 Nobody else is going to be here, right? We'll ask you to speak up. Oh, wait, we've got more. Come on. Great. So I want to welcome you all to Let's Talk About Context Baby. My name is Bill Brigham. I am proud to be a board member of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. And I've been a long-standing member of the conference committee. And I have recently moved from being a festival presenter to being a university presenter. And so a lot of the issues about doing contextualization work and having the opportunity to have much more deeply engaged artists' relationships has been a big part of my personal transition. So this panel is really meaningful to me very personally. And a lot of ideas that I think we're going to be talking about are ideas that have been very much on my mind as I make this transition. And I am very proud to share the panel with these three fantastic colleagues who I think are really kind of exemplary in terms of the kind of work that they do. We've got about 90 minutes. And because my general feeling is in these kinds of APAP panels that there's a lot of expertise here but there's a lot of expertise everywhere we look. So we're going to spend probably the first half, maybe a little bit less on sort of the moderated conversation but really open it up to everybody. So it's a room-wide conversation. But at any point in the non-Q&A sort of part of the conversation you've got a comment, you've got a thought, you've got a question, you've got something that any of you want to add or amplify or question or challenge, please feel free to do that. Just give them a moment so they can turn the camera around and capture you on the livestream on HowlRound as well. And if you are a lot of tweeting it, hashtag APAPNYC also at HowlRound and it's HowlRound.tv is where people can stream it if you want to spread it out to your world. So I want to just start very quickly and ask each of the panelists to introduce themselves very briefly and just quickly talk about in the introduction the role that contextualization work plays in their work. So we'll start directly to my right with Jackie Chang from Brick, which is Brooklyn. It's just Brick. Brick, would you celebrate Brooklyn and Brick House? It's Brick Arts Media. Hello everyone, my name is Jackie Chang. I'm the director of Education at Brick and we are a multi-arts organization in downtown Brooklyn. We are the largest presenter of free cultural programming in Brooklyn and one of the biggest in the city. Every year we engage over hundreds and thousands of people through our programming at Brick Arts Media House and we have facilities for two performing arts spaces, a media center, three TV studios and a 3,000 square foot contemporary arts gallery. We also do off-site programming at venues like Prospect Park where we do the Brick Celebrate Brooklyn Festival annually as well as programming in libraries and schools throughout Brooklyn. Hi everyone, I'm Martha Redbone. I'm a singer-songwriter and I have a project called The Roots Project where I decided to kind of explore my background, my family culture, which is a mix of Native American, African American and European stories from my family through music and community outreach as well. And I'm really pleased with the journey and kind of in awe as well as I realize through my own story that I'm also telling other people's stories as well. And it's really cool because I grew up kind of getting into a lot of fights about our culture at home and the existence of Native Americans and then when I share the stories with people I notice that the world is a lot smaller place than I realize. And through that I'm able to communicate with younger people, people in reservations, people around the world and other countries and kind of retell our stories from the horse's mouth because what people have been taught in history books and schools, what little they've been taught has been alive. So it's kind of up to the people of the communities to share our own family stories. And that's kind of the journey that I've been on for the past few years. And what she's not saying is that while she's historically done this mostly through music she's now also doing this through theater or show Bone Hill, which has been developed by the Public Theater and Joe's Pub and it was part of under the radar. It exemplifies all of what she was just saying. Alright, and Margaret. I'm Margaret Lawrence. I'm the Programming Director at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College. We're a year-round multidisciplinary performing arts center. Woo-hoo! And we are serving both the campus itself as part of the educational process for the students but then also the community. We're kind of the big deal for 100 mile radius in that regard. And so a lot of what we do is looking for really diverse both art forms and forms of expression, orientations, backgrounds, ideas, knowing that the community outside of the Dartmouth campus which is very diverse, is as we say, economically diverse, but that's kind of it. So the expressions that we're bringing in many cases are people's very first introduction to a particular culture or a particular artist. We've been very honored to work with Martha and continue to have a relationship with her. And I'll be talking today about kind of a case study of a residency in terms of how we approach contextualizing what we do. And I'll go break in currently the Executive Artist of Director of the Arts Center at NYU and Abu Dhabi. It's a brand new performing arts center at a brand new university on a brand new island. In a fairly new country in the Gulf. And this is our inaugural season. We have our brochure too. And we've been very much developing things on a residency model with artists coming in. The shortest for three days on average a week and in many cases for two weeks. And a lot of the ideas that we've been experimenting with, I've been I think kind of borrowing and stealing and pilfering from people like Margaret, especially and a lot of the sort of creative campus conversations that have been happening here throughout APAP. And a lot of those programs have been really developed by our videotaping colleague right back there, Mohandal Bakri, who's our Director of External Relations and Partnerships. In addition to that, I am also one of the co-founding directors of GlobalFest. So we've been doing a lot of work presenting a festival, a decontextualized festival, but designed to stimulate touring of globally based artists throughout North America. And now we're also, we've got a touring fund, a GlobalFest touring fund. And we also created a tour that Kami Music is putting on the road this spring called Creole Carnival. And we've been doing a lot of work with that and the presenters in the markets that we've been working with, many of whom are presenting artists from Haiti, Brazil and Jamaica in this instance. For the first time in doing a lot of work to try to kind of develop approaches collaboratively that can help move that forward. And I'll just shout out, Mira DuVal who's been working with us developing a lot of those materials as well. So the first thing I want to do since Margaret has been very much my guru for a long time is ask her to start off with a little bit of a case study that I think could really help frame the conversation of I think some of the best practices in the field in terms of presenting artists within the university context and really creating a multifaceted collaboration with the artists and with the communities. Sure. So we never bring artists without doing more than just a performance with them and I think that's kind of becoming just the way that our field operates which is a great thing. But often we will try to hit as many points of connection with particular artists as we possibly can. The example that I brought with you for you today, I have more up here, but I think this might be enough. But if it's not, there's more, just grab them for yourself, is a band that actually I finally got to see through Global Fest which is La Funda Cecilia from Los Angeles. This is actually a very small residency for us. They were here with us for a couple of days and they did the concert. That's very short for us. Usually we're doing even more than that. When we, as I said, we're really trying to help contextualize artists that what we've seen, there's really no Latino community outside the campus in Northern New Hampshire. There just isn't. And for sure the school kids in our community are not going to be like learning about immigration issues or just any of that stuff where we live where this is not happening. So when we do this, we are both using the university as a resource for helping set that cultural context but then we're also very much inviting the artists into helping us create the context for their own traditions and their own artwork themselves. So in this case, the first thing that you have here and we're going to take you through this paper, but this is on top is a study guide because we asked La Funda Cecilia to do a 10 a.m. school matinee right in the hall. And when we do that, we produce, we write and produce the study guide. And so we did that together with them but we wanted to make sure that the schools understand what is a corrido, what are these forms of music and where they come from and who are these people but also a little bit about contemporary immigration reform issues because they're not going to be hearing that really from anywhere. And what in the process do you deliver this material? We sell the whole school matinee series before the season even goes on sale. So like in May we would sell that whole year but then they get the study guide about a month up and it's online. Then the last, and this is the part I really want to go through with you to show you, the last couple of pages tapped on here just black and white paper are an outline of the actual residency. So as you go through this, you can see that they were doing, the artists were themselves going into classes at the Dartmouth campus. They were in Spanish classes. They were meeting with student groups. There are students who are actually working themselves on immigration reform, Latino students from all over the country. Then they did their performance. Then they did the Q&A. Then the next morning they did the school matinee. So that's a very small residency for us. Often we will be also calling upon the resources of Dartmouth, the intellectual resources like faculty and guests from the community to do a public panel especially about a particular issue. You know, maybe it's global HIV in Africa because we have South African choreographer Dada Masilo who's there right now and doing a piece, you know, taking Swan Lake into a homophobia context, right? So these issues can get very, very specific and they can lead to really, really rich conversations. But this is kind of just a little lovely Tiffany Iceberg example. Maybe I'll pause there. Well, she's pausing. Does anybody have any quick questions? I have a quick question. What's the staff structure? How many people do you have that are working on this part of the work and how much overlap is there with people who are working on the presentation and production side and how do those teams intersect? Well, the production end is really about the show and in this case the school matinee since it's in the very same stage the next morning. It's pretty much the same as the show. But we do have, please don't hate me. We are really fortunate right now to have an educational team of more than four people aside from me as the programmer and a programming assistant who does all the contracting and all the grant support work because I'm also the grant writer. The reason we have that many people though is partly because of these which are, you know, residencies are very resource intensive but we also have a tremendous number of other programs that I've not even talking about. So we have, you know, whole community projects with soft funding coming in from grants and we have the school matinee series is actually the responsibility of part of one of those educational staff members world, right? So that's a big chunk of what she does. It's not all what she does, but it's part of it. When I made the first initiative to invite a group like Los Angeles, I often have a general impression of the kinds of things that I know I want them to do. But my lead educational director, Stephanie Pacheco, who I think you know is usually right in there with me and we're thinking it through because one of the very first things as probably all of you know is not only to make the commitment but then to like probably write a grant for it. So we have to kind of know where we're heading with these contextual ideas even as we ask for the funds to support the engagement. So the planning happens very early. And how much of the, how much of the, kind of the outline of what this residency will be is taking place before the offer stage or before the contract stage. Kind of where within the timeline of the season planning are you starting to put this? Yeah. So let's say the offer is going on like right now for next year. I would already know that I need two days of residency. I'll be really explaining my offer like arriving by the night of this and ready to jump in the next morning. And I'll say maybe they'll be doing residency activities, maybe to include probably class visits, probably social interactions with people, maybe workshops, whatever. So we'll kind of hold that time. We'll hold like maybe three activities a day. We don't know what they are. We'll definitely know about the school matinee. And then as we, it doesn't all have to be a split in the contract but the timing obviously of when they arrive and the nature of what they're doing there is talked about in order to be in the contract. And then, you know, once the contract is signed then we start to get more and more specific and kind of often it's directly with the artists. Is three of that today? Is that a pretty common? That's a pretty common standard. And in fact, if you're doing three activities a day I would be also further explicit to say to the agent or to the artists themselves, you know, not all three of those would necessarily be performing kinds of things. Like one might be totally just a social thing like a meal with students or a meal with the community or a pilot, whatever. One might be a workshop. One might be a class visit where you're actually performing because I think three different performative things in a day is a lot to ask. And do you have the artists, are they staying on campus? Are they staying in hotels? Kind of what's the physical aspect of the relationship between the artists in residency? We're a really small town. We're like a town of 11,000 people. So we're lucky to have a really great, great, great hotel right on the campus and we have an incredible deal there. So unless it's full, which it sometimes is, but usually we can finagle, they're staying on the campus in a hotel that's actually physically attached to the venue, which is pretty great. Yeah, so they are part of the community. They are also kind of bumping into people even as they go eat or just whatever. Yeah, great. Any questions before we can move on and we're going to circle back but I want to kind of frame it with everybody. All right, so next, since we have an artist here and Martha has done a lot of deep work in these kinds of relationships in lots of different kinds of venues and institutions and more community-based work as well, I wanted Martha to talk a little bit about her experience kind of working in some of these same and different kinds of settings. Hi, everyone. Well, first of all, at Dartmouth, we had an amazing time. It was a really wonderful residency. We were hosted the first night by the Native American Students Club who did have a potluck dinner and I got to meet people, students from that community and we basically just had like a dinner kind of round table discussion about things that they were dealing with in their community, the isolation of how they feel being so far away from home. Some people had been on the res their whole life and then here they are on campus and adjusting to that. Some people were dealing with issues of sexuality and transgender things and the acceptance of that as students on campus as well. And then at the same time, you know, we were all, you know, our homes were so similar to each other even though we were all from different tribes, you know, which was really cool. So we had a really great conversation and we could have actually talked all night long, you know, and so that was really great fun. And then we had some lecture classes. When we did the residency, it was based on a project that we have an album project called The Garden of Love, Songs of William Blake, where we set the poetry of William Blake to the music of Appalachia and the celebration of our family, our coal mining family from Harlan County, Kentucky. And this was really cool because the instructors were really, it was amazing, like we talked about coal mining, the history of those mountains through a perspective of, you know, the Afro-native experience. It was just really women and cultural identity, all kinds of things we did talks about. And this was in like a classroom discussion. I think one of the classes they were actually studying, William Blake, so that was great because they were right in it, I believe, you know. And so this, as far as, you know, music is concerned, I could talk about it as a lay person and also from being from this region and a person of color who was raised in both the mountains and in Brooklyn as well. It was just really, really great fun. And then we had a sponsor's night, and that's where, that was amazing. Martha went to a donor's home and none of these donors knew who she was. And of course, like in 10 minutes, they were like singing with her. It was really fun. It was really great fun. And so hearing music that, you know, you can only hear on NPR, you know, I'm at top 40 and I didn't show them my navel, so, you know, that's pretty much the only way people pay attention to music these days, you know, show them your belly button and make a music video with lots of cleavage and, you know, that. So that was great. I mean, we, you know, so I kind of had a visit and with all the kind of tears of the community basically and all in the name of poetry and this culture. And then the band came in and then we had a big concert which was received really well as well. And what was it? There were a lot of people at that concert, right? About 800 people or something like that. I mean, so it was amazing. You know, people were there to have a good time. They supported the events in the area. And I felt that, I mean, for us and for me as an indie artist, I felt it was a huge, absolutely huge, huge, huge success because people paid attention. You know, people were interested. People wanted to learn. People asked questions. They covered, you know, Dartmouth has a history of being the Native American boarding school. So, you know, that was like an ideal location for us, you know, and particularly for that project. I'm excited to see what, you know, this new project that we're working on, Bone Hill, this kind of theatrical musical piece which digs in even deeper to the story of America, you know. So, we've done residencies like that around the country but I feel that certain ones were particularly successful because of the art center's ability to kind of make contextual curriculum for us to follow and for us to be able to share our stories. One of the things about artists who are doing music that represents their culture and represents and tells their story, one of the things that we love to do is to share our story about where we come from and how we came to be and things that, you know, people don't really think about when they're just grooving and having a great time but it's something deeper to that, deeper than that and then once you share it with them, they want to know more and then there's this wonderful cultural exchange, you know, where our family was like this, you know, and our family was like that when we came from home as well. And so I think I'm excited about, that's why I love Global Fest so much because these are groups that come from all over the world that have a story and a message that's in their music and it's just, it's greater than just kind of something that sounds good, just something really intrinsically deep and soulful and connected to the earth and that we all need to be a part of, you know. And I think finally for the first time, I think the world is ready to hear all of our stories and to not just hear it, not just listen to them but to understand and accept, you know, our stories from the horse's mouth, you know. So, let's talk just a little bit about that relationship. So, kind of all these different kind of experiences that you were part of at Dartmouth. Yes. How many of those ideas did you come to the table with as the arson say, this is sort of the menu of things that I like to do when I'm working with students or working in communities. How much of these are things that came from Margaret or Stephanie or the team at the Hopkins? Like, what's that relationship like? There's an email exchange and then we had to talk about all the things that we cover in particularly. And, you know, like for our project, you know, I also teach traditional Southeast and Toronto singing so that was also, you know, something that I offer as part of, you know, the package if anybody wants that. It usually works well if we have community or outreach in the schools, you know. Sometimes, you know, local schools will go out to the school or sometimes they will bus kids in and we'll have like an assembly in the theater and we'll do kind of a talk and singing music workshop. So it was basically like a list of things that I'm able to do that I think I could try to do a good job at and also things that Margaret and her crew were interested in covering as well because they know what's going on in the schools. Yeah, and we're scouring the course schedule to see like, well, what fits. There's a course, but it only needs on Wednesdays. Right. Oh, no. Right. That kind of thing. And then just like a mechanical standpoint, you talk about, so you're coming in first before the rest of your van comes in, you're not all coming together, you're sort of staggering that to do the their residency activity and sexual work. It actually all depends on what is needed when is needed. You know, if it so happened that, you know, say there was a kids thing or something that required that we do like an acoustic set or like a stripped down version, maybe we'll have one or two guys come in, you know, if we needed everyone on the one day. We do, we work accordingly to however, whatever they need. We're just, I mean, for us, and I still feel this way, it's so hard to get our music out there independently. You know, I've never had the big record deal with the machine working for me. You know, I do everything. I'm the van driver. I book the flights. You know, finally I don't book the gigs for the first time, and that's thanks to Global Fest. You know, but, you know, but I'm still, you know, Shirley Partridge. You know, I still, that's what I do. And, you know, and I'm happy to do it as well, you know, until whatever such time that it's, you know, come on and get happy. But we are just thankful that people are listening and people are ready to listen and to learn more so that we can share more and learn as well. So we do whatever it takes. And as far as the success, you said, you performed with about 800 people in a community that essentially didn't know you. Right. In terms of ticket sales, in terms of attendance, was there a mix by once, Martha started coming into the community? Like, do you notice that as immediate impact? So is this residency work, is it about deepening the experience, how much of it is also about being a marketing opportunity essentially and then driving attendance at the event? For me, either. Well, we want all those streams, of course, to converge, right? So it starts when we first announce the season and I'm doing kind of live big video pitches and I'm actually trying right then to start to create context for her work, right? And that you can trust me, but also here's why it's important and here's what her role is in this season. And then, so, like, let's say there's class visits, we're really working hard to get those teachers not just to recommend that their kids come but to actually require it, right? It's part of their education. It's experiential education. So there's that. And then, of course, there's these remarkable artists. So everyone that Martha talks to falls in love with her in five minutes and that's just the way she is. And so the more people feel like they have gotten a personal access, a personal connection to her, those donors showed up at the show and they already knew how to sing back because, like, they were her best friend. So, I mean, those streams all kind of converge and we definitely see, we do see the impact of presidency absolutely in terms of the experience. And also, I was going to just add in, you know, most of these places, you know, will have not heard of me, like, you know, if it weren't for, like, a platform like GlobalFest, or these things that are going on that we're part of that arts presenters come to, to see us, but people in those communities, we've never been. So it's a total introduction. So the fact that, you know, something that's connected to a university that can bring people, they can supplement their ticket price, make it low to encourage people to come, you know, make it part of the curriculum so that they can get a credit for it if they come and they sit. So, you know, and then it's our job, it's my job as the artist, you know, to try to win them over. You know what I mean? To get you to listen. Because, you know, they'll just sit there and kind of, you know, so I can get my things stamped and then I'm on to the next thing. But to basically, the challenge is to be able to win them over and to have them interested and hope that they like what they hear. So I'm on to the concert or, you know, through the workshops that we do during the day, if they're really turned on by it, they'll come back and they'll bring friends and that's the beginning of our relationship to our new audience. So, I'm an engineer manager with South Asian Artists and I have some amazing teaching artists and there's kind of two sides. One I've worked with presenters similar to Hawk who do wonderful residency work and take care of it themselves but there's no correspondence with curriculum at all so I will actually reach out to professors myself and say hey, I have people coming through and we'll check schedules even and go bring your students, I'll do a free my artist will do a free workshop with them before because the presenter's not involved in that piece. But one of the challenges I've come up with which I wonder if you take into consideration aside from the Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday are they meeting is where are they in their curriculum when my artist is coming in and I try into like oh, you're coming too early I'm not at India right now and I've heard that so do you consider that when you we totally consider it and we are learning from the faculty themselves how that curriculum flows but I will say we share the venue with all the student-performing ensembles so we're almost like a festival we're right at the beginning of every quarter and then it kind of eventually gives way students don't even know if they're really taking that class but our faculty have gotten used to us because we really take them through it and like in September we had the great Taylor Mack the performance artist Taylor Mack and it was on the first day of classes and he came into the class and started to talk about gender in a way that you know there were like football students in this class they didn't know the terminology, whatever, it didn't matter then they went to the show, it blew their head off and then three weeks later in the course they got to that vocabulary all of these students already knew it they knew it from the artist so here's a faculty member that sees demonstrated that the arts have this incredible impact on their students and that it may not always line up with the order of their curriculum but it's going to be so rich the way it adds to their students' experience and their understanding of that actual topic but part of that is because there's a relationship that's filled over time that the faculty are it's okay if we're going to go out of order because they know us and I would say from our experience because it's a brand new program we're really sort of inventing as we go we had for example we had jazz saxophonist Rudra Shmahantapa this past November and there is a jazz history course that's in the spring semester so the professor we do meals and so he came and they got to meet over a meal kind of a group community meal but then one of the things that we did was we set up a videotaping session so he could interview him for an hour while he was there because the arc of that class Rudra Shis one of the artists that he was really using as an example of sort of where jazz is going and kind of what the opportunity is so we were able to do that but in that exchange I also say can you share your syllabus I'm curious what else you're doing and let's see what else dovetails and we are doing a funk project in April with Peewee Ellis and Fred Wesley from James Brown's band but Peewee also was a protege of Sonny Rollins and so what we realized is that they were doing a unit on Sonny it didn't coincide so the professor actually switched the syllabus and we had enough time so that now they're going to focus on Sonny Rollins when Peewee is going to be in town and we met with Peewee actually happened to be coming through this weekend so we met with him and he's going to pull out I think he's going to pull out recording tracks of Sonny's band and then play himself over the music and it's all because we just started this communication with our colleagues and we've been trying to meet with different departments with arts and humanities and going to division meetings but then also in deans it's kind of word of mouth discovering oh you should know this faculty because they're doing research in this and really just sort of uncovering sort of grassroots partners now a lot of what we're talking about is framed in this very specific context of the university and I think a lot of this there's a little chicken and egg I think that people will be doing this because it should be done a lot of it's also been driven by the foundation world through the creative campus initiatives Jackie is not working in a university context so it doesn't have the same kind of embedded resources in terms of faculty and student groups and those kinds of things so morning Jackie if you could talk a little bit about kind of working in a very different kind of arts or education and how you come up with some pieces yeah so what we do actually I think is really kind of special and unique and has a lot to do with our organization being a multi-arts so we have media, we have visual arts and then we have performing arts and what we do in terms of contextualizing is put the artist in the driver's seat so when we do our fireworks residency this is our current residency spinning wheel with Baba Ben Israel he is a hip hop theater artist but he wanted to he received our fireworks residency and his performance spinning wheel is a conversation between himself and his father who was also a performing artist the living theater Steven Ben Israel who recently died and so how we were able to allow Baba to have the experience of contextualizing his work further than the performance itself is that there was a gallery installation, there were also murals created and he did a stoop series which is a conversation that that's on our stoop, we have the stoop area I can't even explain it wait I might even have a picture but anyway to get a feel for it, this is the stoop it's the architect kind of created a public space, indoor public space using the Brooklyn stoop as a way where people kind of could interact in this casual way so Baba did a presentation about Lord Bentley who is a he's a lot of people consider him as the father of hip hop so he was able to contextualize his whole residency himself by doing the programming and what we did was lend him resources our resources are staff also our curatorial team in helping him put this together and think about it and our education team so he's doing he's going to be doing this week a workshop around hip hop graffiti and kind of hip hop culture so these are all his ideas actually what we did was support him in doing it and making sure that it was done in a way that is presentable at the highest level so if you get a chance please go out there and see it because it's currently up his show, his last performance I think was yesterday the exhibition is still up and what he did was he took his father's archive and made a gallery installation and recreated his office his father's office and did video projections on him so as an organization we were able to help him do that to kind of really do a very contextualized arts experience for the viewer it also helped us develop our audience by cross-pollinating so the people who usually visit our exhibition space got a chance to kind of also think about seeing a performance where they may not have also our media because he did so many projections and we actually captured his performance through our media team that's basically a general idea what we do at BRIC in terms of supporting artists and contextualizing putting them in the driver's seat on how they would like to contextualize their work so my first reaction to that example is that Bob is a little exceptional because he's also been an artistic director and curator and ran an arts organization in Manchester, UK is that a correct assumption or if you've got artists who aren't necessarily as experienced doing this kind of work how do you bring them so that they can engage in a similar way if it's not been part of their career path with GLOBALFEST and when I talked to a lot of artists who've been coming up from the maybe the more commercial music world where people are used to going, playing at a club and that's the end of it and saying oh you need to think about doing this kind of residency activity, this is one way to escape having to do a daily 5am lobby call it's a way to fill the first half of the week when there's no business and actually kind of sustain the group physically, financially, emotionally, spiritually all of that and for some of these artists it's very new to their experience so how do you work with artists who might not have that in terms of their experience again I think it's the real uniqueness of BRIC where we have a whole curatorial team contemporary arts curatorial team we have a whole team that is putting out work constantly in media for television so we're able to bring all these resources in and helping an artist kind of think through how they might want to contextualize so our season is not just these residencies our season is contemporary art exhibitions TV shows that we produce education when we're going outside and doing media education teaching people how to make their own TV shows so we're doing our own things but when we're supporting an artist and contextualizing we're bringing all this resource to the table to help them achieve what you're talking about to be able to go and we've done BABA is only one example we did the WOW opera series where we took nearly vanilla well the artist took nearly vanilla vanilla during a minute opera but they used every single space in the gallery to do the opera so that we were in the gallery they did a fake gallery show so it's all these it was really fun to be able to to throw our resources in our professional resources in these different areas to help them achieve and integrate their vision so where within the organization does this kind of work is it sitting within programming, is it sitting within marketing is it sitting is education a purely kind of self it's own problem we do it all together when we're doing these residency projects everyone meets together to see what the performing arts team takes the lead on it but we come together and really see how we can support it and where it fits into our programming as we plan the year out I think the Rodney King presentation was also a really great example of how we can contextualize using another department or another arm of Brett so what happened was the media team saw an opportunity to do a town hall meeting around the last performance and we were able to very quickly put together a panel of not performing arts experts but experts in police brutality city council members other visual artists and very quickly put this town hall together which resulted in stopping traffic on on Flatbusha Avenue it was a very powerful thing but it was an impromptu kind of inspired action so I think that's the advantage of that brick has outside of just performing arts organization is that we have these other things that we control upon and react very quickly and support artists very quickly I want to get a sense of who's in the room now as we move towards maybe more open conversation first how many people in the room are artists do we have artists in the house a couple of artists within the presenting world in the arts itself marketing education agents for arts great so does anybody have any questions thoughts or responses I have a question kind of from Margaret but if anyone else wants to go on and the guide that you share with us besides contextualizing the artists and where they're coming from and their stage the very first thing is sort of also contextualizing for the people coming in the theatrical space that they're coming into and I want to know if you could talk a little bit about that but also is that something that you primarily do for these like outreach efforts to schools and non-traditional audiences or is that something that you also see yourself either doing or wanting to do with your traditional audiences great question so did anybody not get this there's more of your get this packet so we have this inside cover page saying before you come here here's what you should know about coming to a theater and this is for mainly grade school audiences and their teachers but what we're finding as we work more and more deeply with other mainly adults and sometimes kids in our community who are not used to accessing the art so we're doing a lot of deep community work right now with lower income communities over the last three years and we're finding that they also want some of this orientation right so we're and it may not be that we are going to hand them a packet and say oh you have to read this before you come in there's other ways that we can indicate and kind of give cues and give help because frankly working on the walking on the campus of Dartmouth feels weird it just feels weird if you don't if you're not already there there's not a lot of signs to know where you're going it's kind of weird it's a club right private university is a club so we're really aware that we're really also aware of the language we're using when we're inviting people who aren't used to us in that we're not like if you use a lot of complicated language in this kind of sophisticated academic language to frame the performance like that is not going to help people feel welcome and even if you talk about a performance in certain language it doesn't feel welcome the word invite is very powerful and it's immediately understood that you want somebody to come so there's what I'm saying is like yes we're really aware of this this page to our study guide and but and we're very aware of how much we need to use those same ideas kind of across the spectrum in terms of audience engagement the ways we do that are really going to range it's funny on the linguistic front one of the words that I kind of hate the most is engagement I think the idea has been powerful but as an individual as a person I don't want someone to engage me we never use that word in the public what besides invite what other words do you use to sort of frame this relationship well in terms of talking about the work you know I'm not going to maybe say that this comes out of the becket you know influence on modern drama you know experimental blah blah blah blah that is just not helpful so if it's a fun show say it's a fun show you know that's okay if it's funny say it's funny if it's great American roots music you can say that and that's an immediate point without talking down of course you know these are grownups you're talking to you that's great but like it's okay to talk about the basics of what it feels like and what you love about a particular artistic experience any questions thoughts hello everyone I'm Albert from Barcelona we are a small company of theater that we just we have been lucky enough to have a residence a production residence in a festival of Barcelona but from street art and we did a theater piece there but the thing where it's a bit a little bit political you know at the end of that show we want to make questions to the audience so the audience leave the piece with some questions that they want to talk there's maybe like a debate a debate with the audience so it's really interesting to talk about the context previously the piece but what about after do you do something else after this to really engage sorry for the word to really engage the audience and continue this process after the show has been played we don't do it all the time because there's just I think for us there's just different kinds of things you don't see it as across the board everything's the same and should be the same but again it's really talking with our artists as to what is most comfortable for them in terms of advancing their art and advancing their own ability to generate new audience so you know for us it doesn't have to always happen but there are definitely when we program or we curate something it seems really timely and I think again as a team we often draw upon each other the senior staff we kind of talk through what we're doing and how we can really shape it and introduce new audiences on our our audience into something different and how do we do that and is it appropriate so I think it might be helpful to work very closely with the curators and the presenters of wherever you are to see what the possibilities are but I think it's also really important for artists to take control of that and say I would like to contextualize my work this way I want to take it outdoors I don't think it's appropriate to do it indoors I would like to see if there are other artists you know in the community who are doing work like this and I think that's one of the big advantages of BRIC is that we have so much resource we constantly like we start thinking about gentrification and we're like we're just throwing things at each other in terms of coming up with what's possible but again I think it's really important for artists to be at the table to contextualize their own work to be really smart about that as well don't leave it to the presenters it might not be the best idea it might not be the best idea sometimes but to be in a partnership exactly, well to add to that like we're in the age where we have to wear all these different hats now so in a way we've gone out of the days where you just write the songs that inspire you and walk down the street and they're just toilet paper and hand them into you know what I mean it's not like that anymore you have to think of yourself as a product which is something that is so foreign to an artist you know but you the world is forcing you to think that way if you want to eat from your music you know and so I was going to mention that we had we did a concert like a kind of theme concert at Yorba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and we shared the stage with the census of CNA and there were I think there were four acts all together that night and what was amazing is you know one of the groups were local but you know we were all kind of coming you know at that time and the census of C was you know they were the headliners but what was so special was the the promoters, the organizers what they ended up doing was a Q&A before the concert because the audience had not heard of our music collectively so maybe some people there were some fans but in general no that had been our first time in San Francisco performing so we were newbies some of the people who were local were part of like a club scene you know so they had a few fans but not really and then you know the census of C was performing there as well I think that might have been their first concert there and so what was great was they had a moderator who talked about all of us where we came from and we all shared this culture this indigenous culture from different perspectives and we all shared our stories and what was really special about it for all of us because of course we're all so emotional we're all like you know bawling our eyes out all the bands were like you know blubbering all over each other because most of the time when you do these concerts with other bands you never get to see the other bands their own thing to do their set you know and so to be able to hear from all of us and to hear everyone's story it really reformed friendships you know and that was super super special it was a way for us to connect not only just with the audience who really got into our music we're excited to hear what we have been talking about learned our life stories it was for us to learn about each other as well so I do think it's great to have that Q&A thing you know I've done residencies where we after the concert you know some of the sponsors will have like an after thing like that kind of after hang where we can talk I mean for my band we make it optional usually my particular band members will only go there if there's some alcoholic beverages so they like to have lots of food you know but we make that optional but we people want to talk they want to learn more which is I find really really encouraging and in terms of we tend to land on always doing Q&A at the end usually artists are kind of wanting to get ready before the concert if we do something beforehand it might be from some other guest speaker that really is contextualized it's something that we feel is really critical for example I'm bringing a Hungarian theater company for the first tour of the campus next January and the piece is about it's about life under communism in Hungary right which I don't really know a lot about just as a person who grew up in California like what do I know so there's a lot of nuance to that slice of history and we want somebody to tell certain things to that audience before they see it so they can understand it but then at the end the Q&A will be with the artists it's brief but it's always there and we find that as a campus it's also a really remarkable thing because the students in the house and the adults in the house they're asking different things and they're both actually learning from each other's questions and we're the only place on the campus where that can happen so thinking about that thinking about your question and the sort of the arc if the residency is a week long kind of where within the arc of that residency is the public performance how much of contextualization work and engagement happens before as sort of the lead in to prepare the audience for the performance and then how much do you focus on things using the performance itself as a catalyst for other kinds of conversations and activities I always want the show at the end because I want those streams to all converge and help support that performance but if I can't get the hall on that exact day there have been times where I'll say well you know the show is Wednesday and then you're going to do some more classes afterwards and that's always fascinating I don't start there because I really want I need the sales I need the people who engage but if it is happening afterwards it's always super fascinating to go into those classes and hear people have the space and the time to actually respond it's very lovely I don't know how to say it we've done some things where we'll have a stripped down version so say we'll have a full band at the end of the week but in the middle of the week we might have you know an acoustic a trio a lunchtime thing and that sometimes can really be cool and you know some students will come but you'll hear and then people will say oh we heard you you know we were walking from one place to another or whatever but it sparked their ears and then you find out that they're coming because they like what they heard so it's all very alright so in terms of in terms of the exchange because I think so much of the conversation has been about the importance of the partnership between the artist and the presenter what are what are the best things I'm going to first post it to Martha and then we'll flip it what are the most important things that a presenter can do to serve you as an artist in this planning process and then vice versa from the presenter's point of view what would be most valuable to get from the artist to create a successful partnership well I think the one thing is you know all of the interaction and planning and talking about you know getting into the crux of things and creating a schedule that really works but the main thing for an artist is repetition you know because people have that one gig you have a week's residency and you have that one time and then you don't see those people again because they have their seasons and then years and years have come after before you invite it back and that can be difficult you can't once you've established relationships with people that have to know you for a whole week and learn about you and then the whole town comes out and it's a great night you know for whatever you know arts council whatever it is and then you know and then it's five years later before you ever hear of them again and social media you know that's one thing but you know the people want to feel that night again so if there was a way that we could be back every couple of years you know two or three years that would make the difference because a lot of people always say when are you coming back oh you know when you love you had so much fun and that kind of thing and then by that time it's like five years later it's like you're gone you know it's that kind of thing so it's a funny it's a funny relationship because you know the arts presenters you know or you know festivals or these kinds of things sometimes when you hear their talk before the concerts begin you know they say okay here we are blah blah blah blah and here we are our seventh year blah blah we pride ourselves on never having any repeats and we're like well thanks you know what I mean because we're the opposite you know like we need those repeats you know that's how we build our audience so those two things are still not really gelling you know we really need to be repeated we need to be invited back I use that as an example for New Orleans Jazz Fest New Orleans Jazz Fest I think the first time I was invited was 2003 or 2004 to perform and because it's the jazz and cultural side we were invited to do a workshop for the Native American Village Cart you know so they sent us out way out in the bayou and they blessed in you know 300 kids from the bayou and we did a daytime workshop a trial program so we did that back in 2003 or 2004 and it was such a success we had a great time and they really enjoyed the music we were received really well we were invited back the following year you know and then the following year Katrina Hurricane Katrina hit so they skipped year because they had all these big guys come in and stuff but the year after we were brought back again and again and again so I've been invited to jazz fest five times and they don't care they don't care they just like we love you we want you to come back and the last time that we were there reactions was the first time we were doing the Woods Project this William Blake thing and you know Quinn Davis came up on stage and I let him faint it because he said I'm going to introduce you you know and so I merely you know passed out and he says is this your first time here or is this my fifth time here and he goes oh we must love you then you know which is so cool you know but that you know that's really important it means a lot for musicians to be invited back with their piece or with a new piece and to develop the relationship with the venue with the residencies and to have this kind of continued thing and new people always going to come and stuff like that but there should be a way to kind of filter in some call backs you know what I mean there's this kind of term that sometimes gets thrown around especially I think in the festival world butterfly collecting and there's you know a certain sense of like oh either Martha Redbone check we've done that or oh Cape Verde we've had an artist from Cape Verde so we're not going to have another Cape Verde and often and you know now Joe's Pollock presented 500 shows a year so it was easy to build these sort of recurring relationships with artists develop those relationships develop the audiences in this case of you know my job at NYU and Abu Dhabi we're presenting 20 residencies a year so you don't from the institutional standpoint I don't want every season to look like the previous season you want it to be fresh and so I think there is always that tension between sort of what serves the institution what's serving the audience and what's serving the artist but there was an interesting conversation this morning that I was in with Ramamala dance who we had residents this year the panel was on creative communication and commissions and one of the points that Ramaswamy from Ramamala made was about within the commissioning process that almost exclusively happens with presenters with whom they worked previously and so you're building the trust and you're building that relationship and I think that's what you know Bone Hill I think is a good example is because you had such a strong relationship with just public theater that's where the comfort level to say alright now we're going to commission you to do something you've never done before and work together so that it continues the relationship but doesn't feel like a retread of what you've done together previously actually I'm curious about it makes me also think about situations where we are working on a more complicated project that's got a longer lead time and say we will find a way sometimes on the cheap but so be it to bring an artist just for a visit just for a visit to do just to be on the campus for a couple days Taylor Madd last March then comes back and performs in September by that point they know something about us some people know them it's incredible what even a really brief advanced visit even a year in advance and artists if you can find a routed way that they're not having to fly across the country just to come and be there it's amazing because then they know that the word has started to go out and they're building their own community you're giving them a chance to come in and start to make their time a year from then a total success it's amazing how much you've been accomplished with that I'm sure you guys have multi-year relationships with some of the artists you work with and I'm sure they come for different sessions of time being in Brooklyn everyone walks around but more than once and I think it's so different than being up in Vermont of course because Brick is in downtown Brooklyn it's artists are always in and out and there are so many opportunities to do something quickly or something longer but yeah very different we did something like that Upstate New York Earlville, New York Earlville Opera House who equipped us and then they equipped us I think it was eight months in advance because there was a power and so because of our tradition because of the workshop that I do we were able to do a workshop for them at the power for the kids in the town which was great and it was at COVID University and we had a great turnout a really really great turnout and a lot of people said you know we know you're coming we're so excited we'll see you in eight months and I kind of looked at that wow that's really strange and I didn't really think about that but when we came back and everyone was there and just thrilled we've been waiting we've had so much fun at the power and we can't wait to see so in small places that can really work when they don't get very much music going on and also our agents managed to route it to make it work for a while so it was on the way to something and we had two or three we had a really nice run from that so we can it can really work and when you're in places like out in the middle of nowhere we have to sometimes drive four or five hours those things really matter but they want music they love music, they love the arts they love theater pieces they love everything they go to their local coffee place and sit and hear people strumming a guitar just to be around live music and for me I believe that the live music scene is people are starved of it can I have the question to everybody about creating context for the work so have people been in experiences either at their own venues or with their own artists or just as a person out there where you felt like wow they didn't create any context for this something didn't happen here have you ever kind of been caught up short where you're like wow either I'm not really understanding this isn't what I thought I was coming to at all or no it's always been perfect I was actually going to ask something that's related so your question is interesting I was wondering what happens when you create context but it still doesn't it doesn't match the audience's experience and what you do to resolve that tension especially because I mean so I work with Bill so I guess this is cheating at least but you know we have an interesting time of bringing artists from so many different situations into a crowd who doesn't even really know that they want art or what kind of art they want to see or listen to and we we're creating context for it all the time and obviously it goes over well in the majority of cases but there's always points at which it misses and so I'm wondering if you can talk about times where you feel like the context didn't work in what you learned from that I'm not saying something to work I'm talking about individual cases for individual people yeah I have no idea so okay so I'm Cherokee Shawnee chopped on African American and you know when you're in a power church in a pantry but when you are when you're when you look black you know people sometimes can't understand that even though I was raised by my mom and speak language and all this kind of stuff so anyway I did a gig out and we were invited to do a gig out in the Choctaw Res and Choctaw Country and so we did community outreach we did a workshop for the kids and singing and all kinds of stuff and meet and greet and all of that and then we ended up being an opening act for like a serious like you know flag waving, Confederate flag waving a country music band you know who were sponsored by you know Jack Daniels you know and it was so interesting because you know that all of the stuff was like certain things that were going on like alcoholism is so strong in Indian Country and like 8 of my great uncles and aunts are dead from it so all of these things came into play and so we were the opening act and so there were 7 of us me, my English husband and brothers from you know these guys and so we walked into the dressing room which was like a big kind of common area and you know we would just say hi and these kind of cowboys sitting there and we said hi and they just kind of looked and it was just for us to do the snowman and then we got on stage so we were the opening act and we got on stage and at that time we had our we was our funk band so it was like Native Soul Chance and all this kind of like Earth Wind and Fire on the Reds and we were in an audience with you know 10 gallon hats and a hand of our mustaches who was like this ain't no culture music you know and we were we were not well received at all you know at all it was a bad match all in the name of being Native you know Native to that area and so we were just you know that was just a bad bad gig for us you know in every possible way creatively you know you know even on Choctaw you know my grandpas from there so it was like not and so to the point where the audience and this is an audience of you know because it was in their kind of amphitheater so it's probably about I would say at least like some people or something you know who were there to see this kind of like real you know like seriously you know Republican white Republican Southern Bible Belt group yeah you know and so that was really really interesting so given being built those cards and which seems like a curatorial problem are there certain things that you can imagine could have been done to take perhaps a poor curatorial choice to have refrained it is there a way that can you imagine a scenario by which that could have been turned into a success it's like because you know a lot of the programming that I do and I think you know with Global Fest and you know often putting artists together that don't seem to naturally fit together has been very often a curatorial approach that I've taken and letting kind of letting people find connections that might only exist in my mind but often you know can spark things so I'm just wondering if kind of within that you know perhaps you know is there a scenario where there's an opportunity for that to be turned into something that was a more positive experience can anybody here think of any ideas that might have been able to but I tell you what though I did not that that particular thing did not work because we were in a very conservative Christian Bible Belt part of the country there's nothing that we could have done to have saved that you know we just did it it was you know serious serious but however you know we have we did do a concert it's a Creek Nation Festival it was absolutely amazing they had two nights you know the first night was you know some big country music names and all this stuff and then they had a native artist who did country music you know and then the following night was the headliner was Buddy Guy the Jacksons the Ohio players and me as the opener that was a great you know that was amazing so they knew what to do they kind of had red night and black night and it kind of worked I mean it really really seriously worked and people loved it and you know the Creek Nation is different though because they're multi-racial as well and stuff and it's just a different vibe you know and there's a lot of love and they also made it free and that really made a big difference and it was like a huge fair you know they had stuff for their kids they had all traditional stuff it was just absolutely spectacular and so it is planning, it is curatorial sometimes with potentially disastrous moments in terms of conceptualization it's because we're presenting something very contemporary and actually I'd love to hear what Jackie has to say mainly doing contemporary work where we're trying to race ahead to somehow keep our audience in a loop as we learned things about the show that we didn't know you know so like one of the most brilliant um um uh indigenous New Zealand artist Lemmy Ponifacio who does these very contemporary large scale dance performances kind of informed by Bouto and you know I learned and no one's ever seen him before so I'm working hard to just explain where he's coming from what the expression is and what to expect without giving it away and still getting people in right because you just don't know so you know like five days before the performance I find out that it starts with an extremely loud explosion sound like very loud in the dark before the lights have even come up which could make people think there's a bomb in the building and I'm not kidding and it ends with a giant dump of like thousands of pounds of powder then kind of cloud out of the audience so what are you going to do right but you have to be so that's the moment that you're scrambling and you're trying to get a letter or an email to absolutely everybody so they know and they know that you're taking care of them so that's a whole nother it's not so artistic but it's because of the artistry that you're trying to keep your audience contextualized as to what they can expect with something that's totally a new experience do you have you know I think this is really interesting in terms of how artists are selected because we do contemporary art often the conversation is about how how the artist is impacting or reflecting contemporary life so it could be contemporary situations but somehow where does this you know this thing that we want to bring in how where does this sit in today's contemporary experience and then also talking about the artistic process because we are lending so much of our resources to that process we need to understand it completely first before we just oh yeah you can do that and I think that's where that's where we're kind of interviewing and looking at artists that it's really important to understand what that artistic process is so we can explain it better and we understand why the explosion is now happening before you know so that we can better support them and we understand our audience because we're programming so I think all that needs to happen for we have to ask the questions ourselves and then have the artist answer them and see if we're satisfied with the answers so that we could program it it's all about really communicating yeah and the artist being really particular about what it is that they're too clear yeah because it's the case too I think the other thing is the question of trigger warnings you know like literal trigger warnings or not I brought Taylor Mack to the David Rubin Signature in Lincoln Center and part of the 24 hour history of American father music he's creating is the incorporation of burlesque dancers and even though it's an indoor space it's a public space and so at some point he told me that he was bringing Taylor a prominent burlesque dancer who generally gets fully naked so we had to have a whole conversation about what's going to happen when Taylor shows up and Taylor is really really strongly opposed to any kind of trigger warnings he hates curtain speeches, he hates things that are going to then get out of reach what's the proper way to prepare the audience who are coming especially in a free context with lots of different histories and expectations and relationships to that and I've seen it also within again the context because we're talking about context of being in a venue where people are getting tickets that are set kind of free and open to the public people are coming and going I presented Camille Brown no no it wasn't Camille Brown well actually two different stories so Camille Brown presented Mr. Tolerance at Lincoln Center Out of Doors at Free Festival and she deals very directly with blackface and with the history of minstrels and deals with issues that are still very very very complicated in the US that is very charged and is being shouted over PA in a public park where not only do the audience who are there but you've audiences who are coming by for real there is a conversation that is the post-show conversation is not situated as a post-show conversation it's situated as this is the third act of the piece it is an integral part of the piece it is not separate from the piece with our security guards and who function as our house staff and said if people complain about the language if people complain about the representation acknowledge that that yes we understand that there are difficult issues that will make people uncomfortable and please stay around for the conversation to talk about that and that we actually can say we're not going to apologize for it we're not going to apologize for the language we're going to say that your response that many different responses are going to be valid and please be part of that conversation and let's use that moving forward and that's really kind of integral to her work sometimes we get blindsided Kyle Abraham we presented a piece which was based on Boys in the Hood pavement and I had seen it at a music film and there's gun violence as part of it I didn't think about it when we were doing our tech rehearsal and all of a sudden gun shots started echoing through the public park in New York City everybody freaked out because again that context of what happens with something that you understand is a theatrical cue because you're seeing it in a theater but again post-public one even that question of what violence is kind of true changes now but there what we ended up having to do is we worked with our security department we tracked exactly what every gun cue was in the sound design and they put out an APB through the entire New York City police system that if gun shots are reported in the vicinity of Damage Park at this time this time and this time know that they're theatrical in nature but again it's like the kind of thing where I have never thought about it and there you have it trigger warnings but yeah but I think even the question of who you're presenting for and how much they have chosen to be in that audience and how much they might be an accidental audience or be happening upon it how much they are familiar with the art or the artist or the art form and how much they're like oh it's a free festival all of those things I think also sort of change how I have to think about it I find that I present a lot of international work including theater and I find it's really appreciated by the audience if I can help them understand where does this director fit into the world of theater in their country because how else are we supposed to know so even if it's getting a faculty member to talk for a little bit before but like here's what's been going on in Chile since the since Pinochet it's been like this and now we have a generation of people who are doing this kind of work and this person you're going to see kind of fits in right over here like it's just really helpful to kind of just get some grip on what you're not even literally what you're going to see but just kind of where does this person fit in that's a whole other kind of context what perhaps a I think Jackie spoke a lot about getting the artist take the driver's seat and the question a presenter can ask an artist is what are the questions you get because I know that as a South Asian woman there are questions that I'm going to get that someone else might not realize that a South Asian person is going to get asked you know and it's just because you've just heard the question so many times that you keep answering it going hey here's something that can be a context or needs context so given that there are certain so required themes that as you and your artists are traveling around really coming up do you then put that into the rider do you wait for there to be a presenter who's savvy enough to ask you those questions or do you actually kind of in your tour packet in your marketing materials are you then putting in an FAQ are you putting in kind of your own kind of study guide presenting guide we have our own study guides so we have several artists that are exemplary teaching artists so I actually if the presenter is not even thinking about outreach work I will push them to be thinking about outreach work and going please let's include something we have a time slot let's make this happen but it's really me being aware of can the artist do it well as well not trying to force fit it just because they're doing South Asian stuff is making sure that they do it well but we have a group which deals with Islamic music and right now it's with Islamophobia there's a really wonderful kind of contextual link with the art of teaching artists so when we were going to they got the Mid-Atlantic Touring Grant where you have community engagement so we did a call with all the presenters that were going to be part of the consortium the artist and myself and just talk through a lot of different ideas before my teaching artists I literally have like a menu of like yes they do music and dance but they also do gender studies they also do kinesiology like you know here are all the other things that can be just to spark that conversation yeah I have a question for you and for you too but when you are preparing to program something that you know probably no one in your community is familiar with what kind of marketing do you do like before the artist even arrives and not necessarily with the residency connections but just with ticket sales like how do you we present the season as a whole so that season for sure it goes out in July for the entire all the way through the next you know fall through May so there's cues in this but of course there's very limited space we've started actually to make our website deeper so that you can click for more and then you can get actually several pages more of contextual information about each of those shows including what you're asking about and then it's really how we find some real estate that people are looking at or listening to to kind of start telling that context story and of course you have a news release and if you're lucky somebody uses it it's a lot of traditionally methods of marketing but it's really being careful and explicit and clear about what the context is that you need people to know great example last week I presented Dr. Brock on Wednesday night this is a Ukrainian almost like a Ukrainian punk band they're taking tradition but they're completely turning it around and they're making up their own tradition and wearing crazy you know they're just amazing and they spent a couple of days of residency on campus but I realized the day before they got there that my marketing director had been doing everything right I'm very involved in like I proof everything I make sure that it's the right nuance or the no no not like that don't use that word it's like no don't say piercing voices but she's amazing anyway so she's really good but anyway I realized that their recordings like the actual just audio recordings that they produce tend to be very avant-garde like really experimental and that those were what we had shared with some of the press I don't know if they listened to them or not but like you really have to look at every piece of the message that you're letting out there and if you don't know what's on every single CD this person's put out like really be aware of what which is the one that is the most like the concert experience that you're going to use like what exact tool all along the way are you going to use Sidenote are actually playing tonight they're so great Global Fest alums and they're playing at Brooklyn Bowl tonight at the Ryan Artists Agency so see them there and this has been fantastic and I think we're out of time but I want to thank Chang and Martha Redbone and Margaret Barnes and all of you for the A-PAP we're going to leave them on the stretch and enjoy the rest of the conference and continue to kind of share any information that you thought might be of value on Twitter, Instagram, whatever hashtag A-PAPMYC thank you Bill thank you all