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Producing a Performing Arts Season

93-811

Units: 6

Description

The performing arts industry has had a varied and lively history in the United States for the last 175 years (essentially once train travel allowed for broad distribution of artists across the nation) with pivotal transformation beginning in 2020 – 2021 due to social upheaval and the global pandemic.  While the field is divided into for – profit and non-profit models with the need to pay the bills a recurring, common - denominator. 

This course focuses on the performing arts set within a (mostly) nonprofit landscape in which organizations produce works to transform audiences and serve their community via one or several intersecting art forms.  Producing a successful season entails selection (planning) and implementation (managing) of programs, something that is neither easy nor consistent.  Driving and complicating the situation is the common bifurcated management structure.  Managers must find a way to implement the vision of an Artistic Director – an individual with an aesthetic and social framework that shapes an institution and its artistic offerings. Arts managers enable this artistic vision within the context of the physical, geographical, financial, and human constraints of a specific company.  Combining and mixing these forces is frequently messy and always an adventure.  Organizational history, indeed the history of the art form itself, often provides vexing constraints and practices to the process that must be dismantled to meet the demands of a socially just, 21st century model.   If a career of ‘doing the same thing’ is the goal, then a different field might be recommended.    

 

This course will examine approaches to producing a performing arts season of programming with an emphasis on the nonprofit season structure that meets the demands of a post-Covid-19 pandemic, digital-forward, anti-racist reality.  Over 7 short weeks we will attempt to answer the following question:
 

 How do artistic and managerial leaders move an organization and its mission through an equitable artistic vision set across a selection of programs while maintaining or creating a holistic system to manage the process and evaluate artistic success, community impact, and mission-centric strategic goals? All this while balancing the technological realities of contemporary existence. 

 

The course is a seminar. It is designed to engage your critical thinking. Reading material, watching videos, listening to podcasts, and attending performances are required. Readings will include books, excerpts, workbooks and articles on planning, management models, and styles.  The producing frameworks for the unique qualities of the panoply of performing arts programs (season planning, education programs, etc) are our topic but within the setting and requirements of individual disciplines. The course will focus on Greater Pittsburgh (Allegheny County) – as a case study and playground but the USA offers useful examples for you to bring to the course as well.

 

Learning Outcomes

 

During the course, students will gain or refine their understanding of and facility with:

  • Mission, strategy, and planning as it influences and drives programming across an institution
  • Management Systems and Models
    • Fundamental management techniques
    • Fundamental program development techniques
    • Emerging planning & management models, from design thinking to agile
  • Artistic, institutional, and budgetary frameworks or constraints that focus organization program decision-making
  • The process of negotiating and contracting an individual program’s intersecting parts (rights, royalties, talent, etc.). 
  • The unique forces professional union contracts impart on the structure of a season, from the collective bargaining processes to the day-to-day contract requirements.
  • Investigating opportunities beyond a simple season of shows
    •  The possibilities for extended life (and income) to an organization’s intellectual property.
    • Digital interventions of various sources
    • The role education departments and community engagement take in an organization’s program planning.
    • The necessary changes to create a season and structure embracing DEIAB principles


 

By the conclusion of the course, students will be able to:

  • Understand the complexities and often conflicting forces within the design of a performing art season. 
  • Analyze an organization’s season and work against both Kaiser & Collins models described in class.
  • Go through a design phase for a year of programming for an institution that reflects a 2023+ reality
  • Evaluate a season against the financial, space, and union constraints of an organization
  • Understand the impact of a union contract(s) on an institution's season planning process and the complexities of changing said contract(s)
  • Identify resources, individuals, and better practices for creating a digital-forward, anti-racist season

Prerequisites Description

93.703 or permission of instructor