ESSENTIAL LESSONS FROM THE ARTIST-ENTREPRENEURS

In this chapter, we present profiles of five artist-entrepreneurs.

1. 1.Claire Chase, artistic director and CEO, the International Contemporary Ensemble
2. 2.Daniel Talbott, artistic director and founder, Rising Phoenix Repertory
3. 3.Christopher Dylan Herbert, baritone, New York Polyphony
4. 4.Loni Landon and Gregory Dolbashian, cofounders, The Playground
5. 5.Alex Lipowski, cofounder and executive director, the Talea Ensemble

These are early-to mid-career, classically trained performing artists who have found ways to make a profession out of their art form while operating outside of existing institutions and traditional career paths. In each case, these artist-entrepreneurs have had to develop business and managerial skills to do so. By telling their stories, we aim to pass on some of those skills to you.

Like the managers profiled in Chapter 6, these five individuals have been recognized by their peers as leaders and innovators. Unlike the managers, everybody profiled here has also been recognized as a firstclass performing artist. We think they are an amazing bunch and are happy to introduce them to you.

In addition to offering you some useful concepts, this chapter will also give you snapshots of life after graduation. There are some difficult moments in these stories, when these young artists had to stare down poverty, self-doubt, and judgment from their elders. If it sometimes seems like your life in the arts is coming to pieces around you, rest assured that you’re in good company. At some points, every successful career seems as if it is not working. And sometimes, of course, it seems as if everything is coming together perfectly. So we have recorded a few of those triumphant moments, too.

The concepts we explore here are just a handful out of the many that could be extrapolated from each story. We couldn’t possibly include everything that could be learned from each of our artist-entrepreneurs, or this book would have no end. And we realize too that there is some conceptual overlap in the qualities we’ve chosen, both here and in the profiles in Chapter 6. The set of skills necessary to find the right branding for your organization (see Rachel S. Moore’s story in Chapter 6) are in some ways similar to the ones it takes to find your niche and fill it (see Loni Landon and Gregory Dolbashian’s story in this chapter). The study of leadership and management is not an exact science. In each profile, we’ve picked out just one salient quality. While a book like this has to explain one concept at a time, a living, breathing artist-entrepreneur displays mastery of many of these concepts simultaneously.

To get the most from this chapter, you don’t have to read it straight through. You can pick and choose whichever sections seem most relevant to your career right now. Like success in the arts, there is no one right path.

CLAIRE CHASE, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR AND CEO, THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ENSEMBLE

AVOIDING MISSION CREEP

In military strategy, “mission creep” happens when the major objectives of a campaign are slowly but surely crowded out by the other problems that arise in the course of fighting a war. Mission creep is dangerous because it is invisible to its victims. Each specific diversion can have a good reason behind it. It is true that troops need to be fed and clothed, rivers need to be bridged, and supply chains need to be kept intact, but solving each of those smaller problems may still not add up to winning the war. A good commander needs to combine tactical skill, which is the ability to solve small problems, and strategic vision, which is the ability to keep your eyes on the bigger prize. Sometimes, in order to win the war, you have to sacrifice or ignore smaller wins, or take risks that seem foolish until you see how they fit into the larger plan. Sometimes, you even have to pass up opportunities to defend progress already hard won.

Mission creep is also a danger in management. When an arts notfor-profit has struggled long and hard just to achieve reliable solvency, for example, maintaining that solvency can come to seem more important than actually making art. Day by day, month by month, just keeping your organization afloat can slowly erode your ability to see and commit to your larger purpose.

Claire Chase—founder, artistic director, and CEO of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE)—has both tactical skill and strategic vision. At key points in her career and in the development of ICE, she has taken risks or passed up smaller gains in order to move one step closer to achieving her bigger ambitions. As Chase puts it, she has cultivated a habit of “turning success back into risk.”¹ Unlike the aims in the military analogy above, Chase’s aims are peaceful, but her career is an excellent example of avoiding mission creep and how staying committed to your vision over the long haul pays off.

STRATEGIC VISION

In 2001, Chase graduated from Oberlin with a degree in music and was on a long bus ride to her future home city of Chicago. On the bus, she had a vision of forming a new ensemble devoted to performing contemporary music. From the start, Chase imagined her new ensemble impacting not just a single city but someday fostering radical experimentation in multiple cities across the American classical music landscape.²

Part of Chase’s inspiration in that moment, which would eventually lead to her creation of ICE, was a European contemporary classical music group called Ensemble Modern, founded in 1980 and based in Frankfurt, Germany. Chase wanted ICE to emulate Ensemble Modern’s unconventional management structure, where there is no maestro running the show but where all decisions, including repertoire choice, are made democratically. She also wanted ICE to have Ensemble Modern’s prestige and rate of output, which in 2001 (the year of Chase’s fateful bus ride) was more than 100 concerts per year, some at Europe’s top venues.³

After Chase got off the bus in Chicago, she wasted no time making her vision a reality. Her very first action was to have a friend swipe her into a Northwestern University computer lab so she could start sending emails and looking up information about how to get grants and start a not-for-profit. Even though she was starting from scratch, Chase took calculated risks and dreamed big: “Rather than having a concert series where we would try and sell tickets and get people to come to a few concerts a season, I thought, ‘No, we need to do a festival. We need to make it everywhere.’”⁴ Charged by her vision, Chase made rapid progress. Just three years into its existence, ICE had picked up numerous mentions in the Chicago press and was putting on shows at ten different Chicago venues, each show premiering a new work by an emerging local composer.

In those early years, Chase ran ICE out of her living room and didn’t pay herself a cent. She worked catering jobs to make ends meet, playing various employers off one another to get the best hourly wage so she could maximize her time creating new music and planning concerts. While some might succumb to the strain of such a life, Chase had two priceless assets that protected her: vision and grit. Her musical education, which had demanded countless hours of dedicated practice, had taught Chase persistence in the service of higher goals. And her ability to hold her higher vision firmly in mind, despite the daily smaller challenges, kept her on the right path.

TACTICAL CHALLENGES

The challenges of those early years were not just musical but financial. During ICE’s first year, Chase applied for 13 grants and was rejected 13 times. During the second year, she upped the number of grant applications to 15 and was rejected for all of those, too. It wasn’t until ICE’s third year that Chase got some traction, succeeding with one grant application out of 17.⁵

After such a hardscrabble start, you can imagine Chase scaling back her vision for ICE or growing more cautious in her use of whatever funds became available. It was crucial to ICE’s later success that Chase did not succumb to either of those tendencies, however reasonable it might have seemed to do so.

In 2010, nine years after ICE was founded, Chase faced down her biggest tactical challenge yet. It didn’t come in the form of a problem but a blessing. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among the world’s largest grant-making organizations focused on the arts and humanities, invited ICE to apply for a grant in its Arts and Cultural Heritage program area. While an invitation to apply was no guarantee of future funding, it did mean that there was a high likelihood that ICE’s application would succeed. The Mellon Foundation is a $6 billion philanthropic enterprise, and its grants can transform organizations like ICE.

In 2010, ICE was doing well. It had grown into a two-city organization performing a dozen or so concerts per year. Two parts of Chase’s initial vision had been realized: an unconventional management structure and a pure dedication to the creation and performance of contemporary classical music. But ICE still fell short of Chase’s vision for a higher concert output and national cultural visibility.

In applying for the Mellon grant, Chase had a choice. She could apply for nonspecific funding that could be used to cover operational expenses, putting a safety net under ICE as it existed (and remember that it represented almost a decade of Chase’s life’s work). Or she could apply for a grant to support an experimental project that would, if successful, propel ICE toward her big vision faster, while forgoing any safety net.

Speaking of the state of ICE in 2010, Chase said, “In many ways we were leveling off and becoming another midsized arts organization. And I saw the potential—we never got there—but I very clearly saw the potential of just hiring more staff, doing more events, paying people more, all of those things that would define success, but I realized that if we went that route, and if we turned this tremendous innovation and momentum into something that already exists, we would be missing an opportunity.”⁶

ICELAB

Despite the lure of a safety net, which would have been a huge potential tactical win for ICE as it already existed, Chase chose the riskier path. She applied to Mellon to fund ICElab, an experimental program entirely devoted to accelerating ICE’s artistic growth.

ICElab was imagined as a four-year project. Each year, six previously unknown contemporary composers were to be commissioned to produce six original, evening-length works to be performed by ICE. The composers and the musicians would work closely together in extended “incubation residencies,” during which the works would be shaped collaboratively. The traditional commissioning model in which the composer dreams up the music in isolation from the musicians was to be discarded. Furthermore, the definition of “composer” was expanded to include “anyone working in a creative discipline that involves sound.” Everything ICElab produced was to be extensively documented on the Web. ICElab also continued ICE’s “normal” practice of having the musicians themselves rotate in and out of and collaborate on all tasks traditionally reserved for full-time administrators. Not a penny of the grant was to be spent on operational support. Everything about ICElab was new or a continuation of something unconventional that ICE was already doing.

If it succeeded, ICElab had the potential to take Chase and ICE to new heights of success and prominence, in line with Chase’s initial vision. If it fizzled, ICE would find itself no safer financially than it was before the prospect of the Mellon grant.

In 2010, Mellon approved a four-year, $340,000 grant to ICE to support ICElab. Chase was thrilled at the chance to use more resources than she’d ever dreamed of to keep her organization as energetic and edgy as it was when it was first founded.⁷ ICElab’s first season was in 2011. By the completion of its final season in 2015, it achieved all its stated goals, premiering 24 works by 25 emerging composers over four years.⁸

The increased visibility caused by ICElab’s furious output has paid off, and there are signs that ICE is becoming the fixture in the American classical music establishment that Chase hoped it would be. The year 2012 marked the first time ICE was asked to perform at the venerable Mostly Mozart Festival, which has been held at Lincoln Center since 1966. Participation in Mostly Mozart is usually reserved for traditional organizations like symphony orchestras and classical chamber music ensembles from cities around the United States.

In 2012 and 2013, ICE released its first two albums under its own record label, with the decidedly cool name TUNDRA. Both albums were written up in the New York Times, which has given no fewer than six favorable mentions to ICElab concerts.

Most tellingly, Chase was chosen by the MacArthur Foundation for a “genius” grant in 2012. Called an “arts entrepreneur” by MacArthur, she was honored as much for her skills as a trailblazing innovator in arts management as she was for her talents as a musician. In addition to the huge cultural prestige a MacArthur genius award brings (recent recipients have included Junot Diaz, a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist; Jad Abumrad, host of NPR’s Radiolab; and jazz saxophonist Steve Coleman, hailed by his generation as the successor to John Coltrane), the $500,000 award has made a great deal more possible for both Chase and ICE itself.

Had she chosen the tactically safer path in 2010, ICE would no doubt still be a healthy organization, but it would not have grown so quickly and so visibly toward Chase’s bold vision. Of ICElab, Chase said, “The results are fantastic; we’re having a blast. We’re creating more new material than we ever have in the past, and at a faster pace. We’re learning more, and we’re growing—at the speed of light.”⁹

ACHIEVING YOUR VISION

In telling Claire Chase’s story, we talk about the difference between enacting a long-term, strategic plan and solving smaller, tactical problems along the way. Another way to think about this concept is by differentiating between visions and goals:

• •Your vision for the future of your organization or individual career is the big picture. It is where you see yourself in five or ten years or beyond. It is the stuff of your wildest, biggest dreams.
• •Your goals are the smaller, intermediate steps you need to take to get you to your vision.

It might seem like an obvious thing to say, but having a clear vision and a set of goals to achieve it is crucial to success, especially in the flexible and sometimes freewheeling performing arts world, where it can be easy to get distracted. As Henry David Thoreau said, “In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.”

Diane Wittry, conductor of the Allentown Symphony Orchestra, recommends planning your career in reverse. Start out looking at the future with a clear vision of where you want to be, and then connect it back up, via intermediate goals, to where you are now. Try to imagine how long it will take you to accomplish each goal, and incorporate that into your planning. At every stage in your career, says Wittry, you’ll be at a point where you’ll have to choose between a number of options. Remembering the path back from your ultimate vision will help you discern the right choice to make. While your goals are almost certainly going to change over the course of your career, as long as your vision is strong, you’ll be able to stay on track. The most important quality a vision can have, says Wittry, is specificity. In her case, she didn’t just know she wanted to be a conductor—she knew she wanted to be the conductor of a regional, midsize orchestra like the one in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The more specific your vision, the easier it will be to plot a course straight to it.¹⁰

Don’t forget to include your future finances when plotting out your vision and goals. Include your future yearly earnings or the eventual budget for your now fledgling organization. When it comes to money, take a page from your artistic career and dream big. Be as specific as possible: How many new works or gigs would you like to perform in a given year? How many full-time dancers or musicians do you want to have on your payroll? Questions like these will fine-tune your goals and let you pace your progress so you don’t get bogged down or lost on your journey.

None of this should make you afraid of experimenting and taking risks, even concerning which goals and visions you incorporate into your career plan to begin with. You don’t have to get it right the first time to get real-world traction with your vision and goals. It is far better to have a plan that you change a hundred times than to have no plan at all.

If you’re not sure what your vision is, then chances are you need to get out in the real world and experiment with what you enjoy and what you are good at. Planning is crucial, but without the insights that come from direct experience, it won’t be enough to move your career forward. So don’t be afraid to get out there and try new things, fail, succeed, and above all learn. As the ancient Roman proverb says: “Fortune helps those who are daring.”

DANIEL TALBOTT, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR AND FOUNDER, RISING PHOENIX REPERTORY

ADAPTABILITY

In Chapter 1, we advised you to be willing to walk an indirect career path, and in this chapter, we extol the importance of devoting yourself to a single vision. Those might seem like two contradictory pieces of advice, but we prefer to think of them as coexisting ideals that require constant rebalancing. At some points in your career, single-minded effort will work best, while at others, a flexible, open-minded approach will move you forward. As the great psychologist Havelock Ellis said, “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” One word for the capacity to alternate holding on and letting go is adaptability, and a fine example of it is the actor, director, producer, playwright, and literary manager Daniel Talbott.

Talbott is the artistic director and founder of Rising Phoenix Repertory. He graduated from Juilliard in 2002 with a degree in drama, and he founded Rising Phoenix Rep while he was still an undergraduate. He splits his time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles and works on productions for Rising Phoenix Rep and other companies in both places. Talbott’s work includes film and TV roles, but his guiding passion has always been live theater. He has produced, directed, or written dozens of plays, and he’s won numerous awards, including a Theater Hall of Fame Fellowship, a New York Innovative Theatre Award, a Drama-Logue Award, and a Lucille Lortel Award for producing. He is supported entirely by income from his acting, directing, producing, and playwriting work.¹¹

We chose Talbott to profile for this book because he is a successful actor, director, and playwright who has deliberately pursued a career in the fine arts area of his profession. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be a big star in film, on TV, or on Broadway. But our primary goal in this book is to aid those whose first aim is to make the art that matters to them, and then build an economic framework to support that process. And while the lessons distilled from Talbott’s career are especially relevant to actors, they are valuable for all types of performers.

FROM HOME BASE TO JUILLIARD

Before Talbott discovered theater, he was sure his life was headed in another direction: baseball. In the midst of a tumultuous childhood, baseball had been Talbott’s haven of stability and structure, and his family expected that his skill and dedication to the sport would carry him through college on a baseball scholarship.

Then Talbott started dating a young woman who was part of the Young Conservatory Program at the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) in San Francisco. She and Talbott acted in amateur sci-fi and horror films together, and she eventually introduced him to acting for the stage. The relationship didn’t pan out for Talbott, but theater did. During his first moments in the Young Conservatory Program, Talbott, speaking over the phone from Los Angeles in the hours before a Rising Phoenix Rep rehearsal, said he had a kind of conversion experience: “Theater was like finding the girl you want to marry and die with. I didn’t know if I was good at it. I had never done it. I had barely seen any plays. But for whatever reason, walking into that building that day on 30 Grant Avenue in San Francisco I just, for the first time in my life—and I know it sounds a little spiritual and crazy—but, for the first time in my life, I was like, ‘I’m gonna do this.’”¹²

Talbott’s entire life did indeed take a new direction starting at that moment. But just having a new vision was not enough to propel him into a career pursuing it. He would have to adapt to new ways of supporting himself and of thinking about his work. The effects of pursuing a new long-term goal in one’s career, even a positive and inspiring one, can be disruptive.

Talbott’s grandparents, with whom he was living when he discovered theater, were dismayed by his abandonment of baseball and withdrew their financial support. Talbott was then only a junior in high school. He adapted by undergoing the arduous legal process necessary to become an emancipated minor, which allowed him to start legally living on his own before the age of 18. He moved out of his grandparents’ house and to Oakland, California, where he started working as an actor as soon as possible. While he had to work so he could eat and pay the bills, Talbott’s early theatrical education was subsidized by a full scholarship to the Young Conservatory Program. He says that the hardship of leaving home proved to be a great blessing because it showed him what he really wanted. Any ambition other than acting, he says, would not have motivated him to work and pay for his new life entirely on his own.

Within two years of leaving home, Talbott was cobbling together a living from his art, combining stage, film, and television work into a sustainable life, albeit barely sustainable at first.

Shifting from baseball to acting also required that Talbott adapt himself to new ways of thinking and new methods of acquiring skills. At first, he approached acting with the same athletic overintensity of his baseball training. This produced stiff, clunky performances. Talbott admits that he wasn’t a very good actor during his first two years. It wasn’t until he embraced an ease and openness in his approach that he began to see positive results.

Most fateful of all, Talbott allowed himself to adapt to the idea, however briefly, that he might be good enough to get into Juilliard. It was Amy Potozkin, associate artistic and head casting director at the Bay Area–based Berkeley Repertory Theatre, who pushed Talbott to audition for Juilliard. He was absolutely convinced that he wasn’t good enough get in. Talbott found Juilliard’s reputation intimidating rather than enticing. Moreover, he couldn’t even afford the $100 audition fee. But Potozkin covered the fee and was firm in her encouragement. Talbott surrendered to the audition process and gave it his all, setting aside prior ideas about the limits of what he could achieve. Staying openminded for the hour or so it took to complete the audition paid off handsomely. Not only did Talbott get in but he got a full scholarship.

Juilliard would transform Talbott’s life and build the foundations for his future career. The network of fellow performing artists that would initially constitute Rising Phoenix Rep were all Juilliard connections, and enmeshing himself in the Juilliard community firmly established Talbott in New York City, the center of the American theatrical scene. Had he not allowed himself to entertain the idea, however tenuously and briefly, that he might be good enough to gain admission, Talbott’s future career would never have been launched.

DETOUR DAYS

Talbott had known since before Juilliard that he wanted a company of his own, where he and his closest colleagues could find steady work and artistic freedom. After waiting one year to get settled into the pace of life at Juilliard and in New York City, Talbott founded Rising Phoenix Rep while still a sophomore. During the summers, he set about producing and directing professional work, even though Juilliard has its drama students sign a contract saying they will not take on professional acting work before graduation. Once again displaying an ability to adapt his artistic ambitions to any situation, Talbott pointed out that the contract prohibited only acting, not writing, producing, or directing. Juilliard responded to Talbott’s audacity with support and lent him space to develop his fledgling company. The work he started with Rising Phoenix Rep as an undergraduate has continued unbroken ever since.

From the start, Talbott wanted Rising Phoenix Rep to be a place where actors, playwrights, and directors would have total artistic freedom. He also wanted it to be a base from which he and others could venture out and take on work in film, TV, and other live theater, while always having an artistic home to return to. It wasn’t until a major crisis that Talbott was to discover how best to make this model work.

In the early 2000s, Talbott and company tried to mount a production of Fen by the English playwright Caryl Churchill. It was an ambitious undertaking for a small company like Rising Phoenix Rep. After securing the rights to the play, the company rented Walkerspace at the Soho Rep in Manhattan, and raised $60,000, which would have made the production officially “Off-Broadway” according to the rules of the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), the union for stage actors. Rising Phoenix Rep had hitherto produced only Off-Off-Broadway shows, which AEA defines as having a budget of $35,000 or less. But for this show, Talbott and company had upped their game, hoping Fen would help them down the path to becoming an established Off-Broadway company with their own permanent space and staff, like New York Theatre Workshop, Second Stage, or Playwrights Horizons.¹³

Just five days before the curtain for Fen was to go up, disaster struck in the form of stratospheric, unmissable opportunities for two of the cast members, who were also Talbott’s friends. One got a role in a major feature film and another got a role in a major TV show, both offering salaries that soared above the small (though honorable) compensation that Rising Phoenix Rep was offering for being in Fen.

Preventing the two cast members from following their good fortune went against the spirit of Rising Phoenix Rep, but so did canceling the show, since it would break that sacred law of theater: “The show must go on.” Talbott and company had to find a way to let their colleagues go but also preserve the honor of the company.

So just five days before opening night, with a city full of advertisements for Fen, a theater full of nearly completed sets, and a substantial, nonrefundable investment in renting Walkerspace, Talbott and company found themselves without a play. Actors have a reputation for being superstitious, and Talbott is no exception. “I think the theater gods are tricksters,” he says. “They like to mess with you to see how you’re going to respond. They love jokes and they love comedy. So watching you fall on your face is funny to them. Looking at it this way helps you see the possibility in failure, and the chance to dig deeper than before and see how you can flip something negative into something positive.”¹⁴

As he had earlier in life, Talbott held on to his vision and found a new way to realize it by adapting to the circumstances. He drew on his extensive contacts within the richly populated New York theater scene and brainstormed with the rest of the company about what they could achieve in just five days.

The result was Detour Days, a multiday festival of ten or so ambitious projects, including two Tennessee Williams one-acts directed by celebrated Off-Broadway director Trip Cullman; The Liddy Plays by fellow Juilliard grad, novelist, and playwright Brooke Berman; and a production of Blue Remembered Hills by Dennis Potter, helmed by another noted Off-Broadway director, Michael Sexton. There were also workshops and two plays that were conceived, written, directed, and performed entirely within 24 hours. The sets for Fen were abandoned or repurposed, and anything else the group needed was begged, borrowed, or stolen. They took a couch from a friend’s apartment, scavenged a bunch of chairs from the garbage, and scoured antique shops for props. When they needed a bed, Talbott chipped in his own. They paid a techie from Juilliard in pizza and beer to hang the lights. To promote the impromptu festival, they went to all the marketing outlets they had engaged to promote Fen and put a positive spin on their predicament, proclaiming that they had decided to go in a bold new direction with Detour Days.

After the smoke cleared, Talbott and company discovered that they had produced something more diverse, daring, and ambitious than what they had originally planned. The experience even gave Talbott an enduring new vision for the future of his company: “With Detour Days, it was so much more alive and fun, and so much more work got supported and done than just that one play. It taught us to be agile.”¹⁵ Talbott discovered that Rising Phoenix Rep didn’t need to work big to achieve big artistic ambitions. In fact, the entire budget for Detour Days ended up barely breaking the $4,000 mark. This was not only less than the $60,000 raised to produce Fen but well below the $35,000 cap that the AEA puts on Equity Showcases, or Off-Off-Broadway productions.

Off-Off-Broadway productions (that’s two offs) differ from Off-Broadway (that’s just one off ) productions in both budget and administrative requirements. Both can take place only in theaters with no more than 99 seats (though, in practice, Off-Off-Broadway shows often take place in much smaller venues, like the back rooms of bars, repurposed industrial spaces, or even homes). Shows produced for more than $35,000 get kicked up into the Off-Broadway bracket, and the amount of paperwork and the number of rules you have to follow also increases. Off-Off-Broadway shows allow professional, unionized actors to mount small productions that put them on display to producers, directors, and their peers, while still respecting union rules. They also allow pro actors to experiment or just have fun while still working at a professional level. It’s important to remember that there is no negative connotation about the word off in this context. In the professional theater world, it is just used to denote what level of resources are gathered for a particular production and what rules have to be followed.¹⁶

Without the frantic schedule of Detour Days, Talbott and company might never have realized the full range of artistic possibilities achievable with the Off-Off-Broadway model. What had started as a crisis and potential failure ended up, through heroic efforts, as a breakthrough. Talbott realized that he never wanted to leave the Off-Off-Broadway mode of production fully behind. So rather than keep Rising Phoenix Rep on track to become an Off-Broadway company with its own theater and staff, Talbott chose to keep his company small, able to pivot quickly between producing either Off-Broadway or Off-Off-Broadway, depending on the ambition of each project and how much time and money were available. Once you have built your own permanent Off-Broadway production apparatus, you can’t go back, says Talbott. You have to keep feeding the machine you’ve built, and vital artistic freedom gets lost. You can no longer, to use Talbott’s example, decide on a whim to do a production of Twelfth Night by Shakespeare in the back room of a tavern for one night on a budget of $5. You would have your full-time production staff tapping their feet, without a job to do and no money to pay them with anyway. Talbott’s example is not a glib one. Freewheeling companies of talented performers have kept the performing arts vital since the Middle Ages, and experimental, small productions are deeply meaningful artistic experiences for Talbott, his colleagues, and their audiences.

Talbott respects and loves the established Off-Broadway companies, and he believes that the American theater landscape would be lost without them. He and his wife, Addie—a fellow actor who also sits on Rising Phoenix Rep’s board—have both worked for the well-respected Off-Broadway indie theater incubator New York Theatre Workshop, and Talbott says Rising Phoenix Rep could not have taken shape without the Workshop’s guidance and support. But for Rising Phoenix Rep, staying small and adaptable has been the best way to achieve artistic success.

By engaging production partners rather than building its own permanent Off-Broadway apparatus, Rising Phoenix Rep has the freedom to produce plays with a budget of $5 in one month and a budget of $800,000 the next. About half of the shows Rising Phoenix Rep produces each year are in the Off-Broadway bracket, while the other half are Off-Off-Broadway. It is a business model capable of adapting to whatever amount of time, artists, and financing is available, and it has allowed Talbott and Rising Phoenix Rep to work more or less constantly.

When he produces at the Off-Broadway level, Talbott partners with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, where he is one of the literary managers. Rising Phoenix Rep often makes use of Rattlestick’s dedicated performance space in New York’s Greenwich Village and the spaces Rattlestick uses in Los Angeles. Rising Phoenix Rep also partners with Snug Harbor Productions, WeatherVane Productions, and piece by piece productions. These coproducing partners have a permanent capacity to handle the financing and contractual apparatus demanded by the AEA for all productions over $35,000, as well as deal with the general management challenges that inevitably crop up in bigger productions.

“YOU CAN ALWAYS BE WORKING”

Like just about every aspect of his life, Talbott structured Rising Phoenix Rep’s business model to be of maximum service to his theatrical work and to make it possible for him to create work in collaboration with other artists, given any amount of available time and money. If he had two weeks, $20, and a bathtub, Talbott jokes, he’d find a writer, commission a play, and find other actors willing to sign on. His desire to work no matter what has driven him to become an artist-entrepreneur, though he wouldn’t phrase it that way. To him, he’s just trying to stay in the game as an artist. “You are an artist because of the work that you do. You are an artist because you create art. You can always be working,” he says.¹⁷

Rising Phoenix Repertory’s name is well suited to the dramatic reversals in its founder’s life at the time of his conversion to theater. And it is equally suited to the revival of the company’s fortunes after the near disaster of Detour Days. But Talbott says he took the name from the nature of theater itself. A live performance burns brightly while it is still going on, but it is extinguished when the performance ends. Yet every time actors and audiences gather again, the show is resurrected and goes on.

CHRISTOPHER DYLAN HERBERT, BARITONE, NEW YORK POLYPHONY

STRIKING A BALANCE IN SMALL ENSEMBLES

New York Polyphony’s artistic mantra is “balance, not blend,” which refers to the unique sound that has earned the four-man vocal ensemble two Grammy nominations, a fully booked touring and concert schedule, and high praise from the music press in the United States and Europe. Because New York Polyphony (NYP) has only four voices, one to a vocal part, each member has to trust the other three to hit their notes more or less perfectly every time they sing. Every performance is an exacting exercise in precision and mutual trust. “Balance, not blend” is also an encapsulation of NYP’s business philosophy. While they have professional talent representation, the four singers divide all the group’s remaining management activities among themselves. While big decisions are made collectively, each member independently carries out an ongoing and distinct set of duties essential to the group’s regular operation. As with their music, there is no larger membership to pick up the slack, and it has taken years of disciplined work to build up to the full capacity at which they now operate. Their balanced self-management style is a great model for any small group of performers.

In an interview at a café near the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Chris Herbert, NYP’s baritone and the group’s de facto business manager, explains how in just two years the group went from having strong musical capacity but uneven business practices to maximizing its potential in both areas.

When Herbert joined NYP in 2010, the group was giving just 10 to 12 concerts per year. As of 2014, NYP was holding steady at about 50 concerts per year, a mark it hit in 2012. That is enough to provide a solid, predictable income for the members (a rare thing in the freelance performing arts world), and it’s limited only by the amount of time the group wants to spend on the road. “Right now,” says Herbert, “we are at the limit of how much we can tour.”¹⁸

Going from scraping together just a few concerts to choosing at will how many the group performs was a multistep process. And it began, says Herbert, with a single sheet of paper.

BALANCING THE DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSIBILITY

Though Herbert was tapped by NYP for his baritone voice, he also brought business skills to the table, which he learned from the board members of Sing for Hope, an arts-focused nonprofit he worked for during the 2000s. Chief among those skills, says Herbert, is the ability to set clearly defined goals that you can measure your progress toward. But before you can measure progress, he says, you have to know where you are to begin with. This was knowledge NYP didn’t have in 2010, either in its finances or its management structure.

Herbert’s first business question to Craig Phillips, NYP’s bass and one of its hardworking cofounders, was “Who does what?” Phillips wasn’t entirely sure, and neither were the group’s two other members. So Herbert got out a sheet of blank paper, divided it into four equal quadrants, and wrote a group member’s name at the top of each. Then each member said in turn what he did, in addition to his musical responsibilities, and Herbert wrote that info under the name. The resulting piece of paper was visually unbalanced. The boxes for Phillips and Geoffrey Williams, NYP’s countertenor and other cofounder, were full of duties, while the other two members’ boxes were mostly empty. Says Herbert, “It was amazing to see just how much two of the guys were doing and how little me and the other member were doing. That visualization helped everybody.”¹⁹ Worse, there was duplication and ambiguity in the existing distribution, which meant that certain key tasks were being delayed or dropped.

The first part of the solution was to balance out the sheet visually. The group redistributed responsibilities evenly among the four members, with some consideration for skill and preference. Herbert took on travel and finances, which he still manages. The duties that fell to the other members during that meeting still remain with them, too.

The second part of the solution was to take any floating tasks and assign them to just one member. The resulting balanced management structure was a relief for everybody. It lifted the drag on productivity caused by lingering resentment over (1) the sense that not everyone was pulling his weight and (2) the annoyance and inefficiency caused by the endless shuffling around of vaguely assigned tasks.

BALANCING THE BOOKS

Like balancing the distribution of responsibility, balancing the books started with information gathering. When Herbert took his first look into NYP’s business checkbook, he was initially pleased. He saw a page with a perforated edge where checks had been written and torn out. To the left of the place where each check had been was a record of the date, the payee, and the amount. Then Herbert turned the page. The checks there were also torn out, but the information about them was missing. The records had all been left blank. As he flipped through the checkbook, Herbert saw that four years’ worth of checks had been written and torn out with no record having been made. When he turned to the group’s bank to reconstruct the records, Herbert was stymied by an unhelpful bureaucracy. It was only the photographic memory of Williams, who remembered what checks had been written despite not having been in charge of the group’s money, that allowed Herbert to reconstruct NYP’s past finances. Even though it was painstaking work, Herbert felt it was worth it, because without past records it would be impossible to set future financial goals. Once again, you cannot move toward where you want to be if you don’t know where you are and where you’ve been.

Gaining clarity about the group’s financial situation swept away a negative attitude toward money in NYP that is understandably common among artists. Because they don’t often make much money, artists can avoid looking closely at their finances, which naturally makes it impossible to run a business well. With a balanced checkbook, NYP’s members were not afraid to know just how much money they made. This allowed them to set clear financial goals for the first time. Any lingering sense of unease about money was replaced by a newfound motivation and even a sense of adventure about what they could achieve.

Herbert also instituted a yearly budgeting process that, instead of being a chore, actually served to knit the group more closely together. Before having a balanced checkbook and clearly defined areas of responsibility, the members had spent their own money on business expenses, often with uncertain hope of reimbursement. If Williams, the group’s de facto musical director, had wanted to take a composer out to lunch, he had to pay for it himself. It was the same if Steven Caldicott Wilson, the group’s tenor, had wanted to purchase new ties for a photo shoot.

Herbert had a two-pronged reform for expenses. First, he got a shared credit card that members could use to pay for group expenses, at their own discretion. Being simultaneously entrusted to spend the group’s money and also assured that it wouldn’t come out of their own pockets boosted everybody’s morale, says Herbert. It also made everybody more willing to spend whatever was needed to get their jobs done. The second part of the solution was to ask each member at a start-of-year budget meeting how much money he needed allocated to his area of responsibility. This was another spot where past record keeping made future financial health easier to manage. By knowing exactly how much had been spent on his areas in the past, each member could be confident of his estimates for the future. Having his own sub-budget also gave each member an increased sense of ownership and a bigger psychological buy-in to NYP’s collective financial welfare.

Two additional changes to the group’s cash flow had the same effect. Herbert started what he called the “one-fifth” policy. When profits came in from a concert, management fees and expenses were deducted from them, and the remainder was to be split five rather than four ways. One-fifth went to each of the four singers, but the remaining fifth went into a company bank account, used to pay off the shared credit card. By making this an automatic part of the budgeting process, the members no longer had to worry about cash flow. The one-fifth policy turned New York Polyphony itself into a fifth group member, which served and continues to serve as a reminder of the group’s collective welfare.

To further increase a sense of autonomy and buy-in when it came to their individual sub-budgets, Herbert also instituted an end-of-theyear bonus, to be drawn from the one-fifth account and distributed evenly once a year. The bonus provides continuous motivation to each member to keep his expenses as low as reasonably possible.

In part because of the new cash flow process, NYP’s budget doubled every year from 2010 to 2013, and it stayed at the same level in 2014.²⁰ Herbert is quick to point out that he’s not the only reason for the group’s success. Cofounders Craig Phillips and Geoffrey Williams sweated it out for four years to establish NYP’s artistic reputation, setting the stage for the group’s current financial success. Herbert says he came along at just the right time to nudge the group in a financially sounder and more ambitious direction. “All the immense growth is not because of me,” he says, “but I think we’re able to measure it because of me.”²¹ He also believes that balancing NYP’s books has brought its musical artistry to a higher level. Worrying just enough (but not too much) about money to have confidence in the group’s financial footing has freed up more mental energy for the members to devote to their music.

BALANCING WORK AND LIFE

Balancing their shared responsibility and their books has led NYP to what, for most performing artists, is a luxury problem: having so much steady work that they need to find sustainable work-life balance. Life in a small ensemble is intimate and intense. Herbert got married to his partner, conductor Timothy Long, in the summer of 2010. He likes to joke, “I married Tim, and then a few months later I joined New York Polyphony and got married to three other men.” Finding room for family and time for other musical outlets besides NYP is a necessary challenge for all four members. Even when the members of a small ensemble work as well together as those of NYP, there is a need for ruthless realism about just how much time everybody is capable of spending together. Says Herbert, “Two weeks at a time, maximum. That’s how much we can tour. We would kill each other otherwise.” On the road, the group has met other small ensembles, including string quartets and other four-part vocal groups, who agree with the twoweek touring limit. Knowing when to step away from work is just as important as building up to a maximum capacity for it.²²

As a performer-manager, it is also crucial to strike a balance in your own mind between business and art. Herbert says he can sometimes get so wrapped up in winning all the various battles of day-to-day management that he forgets why he’s in music in the first place and not making a lot more money in another profession. Keeping his higher purpose in mind keeps him focused and content with where he is and what he’s doing.

“Sometimes it feels like the most existentially pointless task that we’re doing, and I question its value,” says Herbert, referring to the group’s music in particular and classical music in general. But all it takes is the thrill of a great performance, or meaningful feedback from a fan, and Herbert’s zeal for the musical life comes roaring back: “Somebody comes up to you and tells you how much it changed something in them, or how much it meant to them, or what an influence it had. And that makes it all worth it.”²³

LONI LANDON AND GREGORY DOLBASHIAN, COFOUNDERS, THE PLAYGROUND

FINDING YOUR NICHE

At some point in your career, you will have a need that seems impossible to meet. Instead of despairing, consider that you have just come across a golden opportunity. If you have the need, it is likely that others in your profession have it, too. And if you can find a creative way to satisfy your need, you’ve got an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to your field, and also a potentially successful business model.

That was the case with Loni Landon and Gregory Dolbashian, two contemporary dancers from New York City who cofounded The Playground, a regular meet-up/happening that provides a place for dancers to rehearse and connect with choreographers and each other. It is difficult to describe The Playground concisely because there has never quite been anything like it in the dance world. It started because Landon and Dolbashian found themselves with a problem: They couldn’t afford to dance.

Dancing, both ballet and contemporary, is unlike the other performing arts. Instrumentalists can do the bulk of their rehearsing alone and just about anywhere. The same is true for actors and singers. But dancers need two ingredients that are hard to come by: wide-open spaces and other dancers. Even in places where living spaces aren’t as constricted as they are in New York City, it is the rare home that has an empty room the size of a dance studio, not to mention full-length mirrors along the walls. Dancers being able to watch themselves move is equivalent to instrumentalists and singers being able to hear the music they make. There is no point in rehearsing if you can’t judge the product.

But just having a studio isn’t enough. Being surrounded by other dancers and inspired and challenged by a choreographer are the most essential ingredients of the rehearsal process. Even the most driven and disciplined dancers need others to push them to their full potential.

Gathering all these ingredients together costs money. Professional dance classes in New York City can cost up to $30 per session, and to stay at the top of their game, dancers need to rehearse almost every day.²⁴ Even at the lowest rates offered by pro dance organizations, five classes a week comes out to $280 per month.²⁵ That would be expensive even in a profession where the average salary wasn’t below the poverty line, as it is for classically trained dancers in New York City.²⁶ Furthermore, professional classes are one of the few places outside auditions where dancers can catch the eye of a choreographer who might employ them. The ratio of able dancers to available pro jobs in New York is so high, in fact, that most choreographers don’t hold auditions at all for fear of being swamped. They just hire dancers they already know.

Add to all these pressures the brutal constraint of time. A dancer doesn’t have her entire life to work professionally. Moreover, a dancer’s training isn’t over until about age 20, and her physical capacity begins to degrade by the age of 35. That leaves a fleeting 15 years in the sun during which a dancer has a chance of breaking through the fierce competition for professional work. For dancers, daily rehearsals at a professional level are a matter of artistic survival.

It was in the crucible of all these constraints that the idea for The Playground took shape. In 2010, Landon and Dolbashian were sitting in a coffee shop trying to figure out how to keep their careers going. Landon had just returned from a five-year stint in Germany, dancing first for Ballet Theater Munich and then Tanz Munich Theater. It is easier to make a living as a dancer in Europe, where government support for the arts keeps jobs plentiful and compensation much higher than in the United States. But once she returned to America, Landon didn’t have consistent work, like so many other talented dancers she had met in New York. Dolbashian had just started his own troupe, the DASH ensemble, and felt he was entering the most challenging period of his career so far.

Staring at the table in front of them, she and Dolbashian dreamed of a way to dance that wouldn’t cost more per session than the cups of coffee they had just bought. It was the sight of the coffee cups on the table, of their willingness to pay just a little to satisfy a daily need, that triggered The Playground. If a group of dancers came together and chipped in the price of a cup of coffee, Landon and Dolbashian thought, they could afford rehearsal space of their own and maybe have enough left over to pay pro choreographers to lead the sessions.²⁷

Their first move was to scout out low-cost studio space for rent at Gibney Dance, a community-oriented dance company with facilities in the heart of Manhattan. The pair then informed the dance community about The Playground via social media and word of mouth. At The Playground’s first session, the price point was “donate what you can.” Landon and Dolbashian bet on the collective goodwill of the dance community—and lost. After the first session, they had a donation jar filled with granola bars, candy, pennies, and some stray cigarettes. The turnout had been excellent, proving that The Playground was satisfying a real need, but you can’t run a business on loose change and cigarettes. Dolbashian and Landon had found their niche, but they didn’t quite know how to fill it yet. So they set the price at a flat fee of $5, where it has stayed ever since. The profits from the $5 fee are enough to rent space, pay choreographers, and keep The Playground breaking even.²⁸

FILLING YOUR NICHE

If you’ve found a previously unmet need and come up with a way to satisfy it, don’t be afraid to tweak your business model until it is sustainable. Finding your niche isn’t the same as knowing how to occupy it over the long term. Be open to experimentation and change in the service of your mission. In fact, to keep your business going over the long haul, you will almost certainly be making small changes all the time.

Playground sessions are two hours long and capped at 30 dancers, to make sure the space doesn’t get too crowded and to keep dancers from feeling like they cannot stand out or are unable to connect meaningfully with the choreographer or with each other. Spots are available first come, first served. For the dancers, the benefits are daily rehearsals and face and body time with a professional choreographer. For the roster of The Playground’s guest choreographers, the benefits are a small stipend and a large room full of talented dancers who are willing to help them work out new ideas.²⁹

From that initial session, Landon and Dolbashian’s creation has become a fixture in the New York dance world. They named it The Playground to emphasize its free-form nature—it is neither audition nor formal class—and its friendly, collaborative atmosphere. At a session we attended a few years ago, the vibe was intense, collegial, and wildly experimental. The first hour was devoted to warm-ups, both psychological and physical, and the second hour was spent exploring a piece in process by that day’s choreographer and session leader. After the session, the dancers gathered informally in the studio and the hallway outside, brimming with positive energy. Everybody we spoke to was thrilled to be there.

For Dolbashian and Landon, the well-being of the dancers and the dance community is what keeps them going. In an interview on Fordham’s campus in October 2013, Landon said, “Once we saw The Playground in action, we said, ‘Oh, wow, people are following us and want to support us!’ And I think what did it for us was, after a few sessions, that some dancers came up to us and said, ‘Thank you so much for doing this.’ And at that, I started to cry.”³⁰ When finding your niche means finding a way to be of service to your larger artistic community, it can be an emotionally charged moment in your career. It might feel so good that you’ll be hooked.

As of 2015, The Playground is five years old and flourishing. It has received support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and it was recognized by Dance Magazine in 2013 as one of “25 to Watch,” a list normally reserved for individual dancers rather than organizations.³¹ It has become well known in the New York dance community as an informal job market and gathering place. Landon and Dolbashian have officially partnered with Gina Gibney, choreographer and founder of Gibney Dance, the space where The Playground meets. In addition to providing The Playground with a physical home base at Gibney’s space in downtown Manhattan, the partnership has given administrative and developmental support to The Playground and allowed more sessions to be scheduled throughout the year.

ALEX LIPOWSKI, COFOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE TALEA ENSEMBLE

TENACITY

The root of tenacity is the Latin word tenere, which means “to hold.” To be tenacious means to hold fast to something. Every performing artist already understands the value of this quality. It is the years spent in practice, holding on to the goal of being a more proficient musician, that turns a novice into a virtuoso. The same holds true for dancers, actors, and all skilled performers.

When applied to the business of the performing arts, holding tenaciously to a single purpose can serve you well. You will no doubt find that in business, more flexibility is required than in your artistic training. Tolerating an inevitable amount of give-and-take will serve you well in negotiations, for example. But holding tenaciously to the big goals of your arts career will ensure that small compromises don’t knock you off course.

Alex Lipowski, cofounder of the Talea Ensemble, a contemporary classical group based in New York City, is a great example of tenacity, both in the artistic and business sides of his career. Talea, which he cofounded with composer Anthony Cheung in 2007, moved into permanent headquarters in 2012. The group has worked with some of the greatest names in contemporary classical music, including legendary conductor and composer Pierre Boulez. Lipowski’s full-time work is as Talea’s executive director, and the group’s performances have been well reviewed by the New York Times and recommended by Time Out New York.³² This is remarkable, considering the challenging nature of Talea’s repertoire, which could be described as unsettling to most people’s tastes.

PROFESSOR BAD TRIP

Some of the pieces Talea performs are better described as acoustic environments rather than music with a recognizable melody. Even the sound notation is unconventional. The music for one piece that Lipowski showed us looked more like electrical engineering schematics than musical notes on a traditional staff. Talea’s instruments are equally unconventional and can be strangely pleasing yet also grating to the ear. Spring coils from abandoned automobiles and copper bowls scraped along metal plates are just two examples. One piece the group is famous for premiering in the United States is Professor Bad Trip by the Italian composer Fausto Romitelli. It is three movements of dissonant sound washes composed of clanky piano notes and melting woodwinds and strings, with sinister electronic undertones. It’s like the soundtrack to a nightmare.

What has kept Talea growing since its founding is as much Lipowski’s personal devotion to popularizing such music as any virtue of the music itself. Speaking of Professor Bad Trip during an interview at Talea’s New York City studio, Lipowski said “It embodies the mission of Talea. We don’t compromise what we play.”³³ An unwillingness to deviate, even from a purpose with such an unlikely prospect of widespread appreciation as contemporary classical music, has characterized Lipowski’s entire career.

When he was in high school, his father told him he had to pick a career, telling him that he could choose whatever he wanted. When Lipowski said “I choose music,” his father begged him to reconsider. But Lipowski held fast to his passion. Later, at Juilliard, Lipowski chose the kind of challenging contemporary music characterized by Professor Bad Trip, and he has never looked back. He says he never had any doubts: “I always knew that new music was the path for me. Not only was music the only way to go but I specifically had to have new music. It’s something inside me.”³⁴

Running Talea has led him to make some compromises. He no longer rehearses as much as he would like to. He says he used to practice for six hours a day and then email for two, but now he emails for six and practices for two. Lipowski has also accepted that there will never be as much government or foundation funding available for contemporary classical in the United States as there is for traditional classical music. But his zealous devotion to the cause of new music has kept him from being discouraged and has helped him develop what he calls a “beautiful relationship” with his patrons.

Says Lipowski: “If we want to have a program, we go to individuals who support and really believe in what we do . . . it’s been so inspiring to share in the growth of the ensemble with them—and to build an organization with them.”³⁵ Lipowski is living proof that no matter its object, tenacity is contagious. If you can truly communicate your devotion to your particular artistic cause, others are sure to join you in supporting it.

KEYNOTES

Questions to Ask Yourself

• •Am I succumbing to mission creep? Is the daily struggle for financial survival or the need to solve smaller problems as they arise, either for me or my organization, keeping me from seeing and working toward my long-term goals? Are there any risks I am not taking because I am afraid of losing what I have already achieved?
• •Are there any performers or ensembles, in America or abroad, who are doing what I want to do or something similar? What can I learn from their success?
• •Are gaps in my knowledge preventing me from working toward my goals? (In order to chart a course, you have to know not only the end point but also where on the map you are right now. For performers, that’s a combination of artistic skills, financial health, management and leadership skills, the strength of your vision, and the quality and extent of your professional network. Some of these areas may be strong. Some of these areas may be underdeveloped. To make real progress, you have to get real about where you or your group measure up and where you don’t. Be fearless in your self-assessment, and you’ll be all the better equipped to meet future challenges.)
• •Am I overworking myself? (Not putting in your time will destroy your chances of success in any field, but so too will putting in too much time. There is a point in all endeavors when effort becomes counterproductive. It is impossible to do good work if you don’t give yourself some time to step back and renew your energy and interest.)
• •How do I find my niche? Here are some helpful questions:
  • −How do others consistently describe me?
  • −What makes me odd or different from my peers?
  • −Is there a persistent, unsolved problem facing my peers in the performing arts community? (Solving it yourself, or collaborating with others to solve it, could uncover a niche that you could fill. By making a valuable contribution to your profession, you might also make a place for yourself in it.)

Tips

• •Write down a succinct description of your vision in a place where you can regularly look at it, like a note on a digital device or a piece of paper you carry with you. If you are feeling discouraged or tired, take a quick break and reread your vision. Do the same thing on a day when you’re feeling energized and effective, to connect your vision to a sense of momentum and well-being. As we’ve said elsewhere, in the arts it is not the promise of financial reward that keeps us moving but dedication to a higher vision.
• •Many performing arts organizations in Europe are still generously state-funded. Consider spending some time abroad after graduation. It can provide you with a steady income as well as give your credentials some added pedigree.

Exercises

• •Vision and goals. In a single phrase, write down the long-term vision you have for your career or your organization. For example: “An award-winning soprano who has performed leading roles in opera houses in Europe and the United States.” Now, in the form of past-tense sentences, write down intermediate goals that will help you achieve your vision. For example: “I have taken a master class with Renée Fleming,” “I have gone to 15 auditions this spring,” or “I have sung a series of solo recitals, including works especially composed for me.” Now, in between your intermediate goals, write down even smaller goals. For example: “I have asked friends and colleagues to recommend potential agents,” or “I have emailed my composer friend to see if he is interested in collaborating on a recital series.” Make the goals as small and achievable as you need to. The magic of this exercise is that it helps you directly connect the actions you are taking today with the larger, more distant vision you have for your career. All of us do better when we are motivated by a sense of purpose and when we feel that our daily actions are connected to that sense of purpose. And one of the easiest ways to get unstuck is to know exactly what small, achievable, but meaningful action is the right one to take next.
• •Distribution of responsibility. (This is for small ensembles of performers who don’t have full-time managers.) Try the exercise that Christopher Dylan Herbert used (as described earlier in this chapter). Take a sheet of paper and divide it up equally into sections, one for each member of your group. In each section, list the administrative duties of each member. Are the lists visually unbalanced? Are some a lot longer than others? If yes, discuss how to balance out the sections or to keep the current distribution with a clear understanding of why. Is there duplication of responsibilities among the lists? Are there essential tasks that aren’t in anybody’s column? Are there tasks that need to move regularly from one member to the next? If you’re doing this exercise in a group, make a collective effort to keep the discussion positive. In listing everybody’s responsibilities, don’t focus the discussion on blaming some people for what they’re not doing. Use this exercise to refine a balanced, positive vision that the whole group can work together toward achieving.
• •Book a performance today. That’s right, we want you to go out and book a performance today somewhere in your community! Juilliard Professor Bärli Nugent has an exercise she springs on her students during her career development seminar. She asks them to leave campus for two hours and come back having booked a concert somewhere in New York City. The students start out shocked and convinced of their inevitable failure, but they always come back successful. They don’t book concerts at Carnegie Hall or in big Broadway theaters, but instead in coffee shops, the back rooms of bars, community centers, stores, art galleries, or other crazy outof-the-way places. In every place, they discover people who are excited about hosting a live performance. The point, says Nugent, is to get her students to realize that the opportunity to share their art and start building an audience is everywhere around them, if they’re just willing to look for it. Don’t hesitate to try out this exercise with a friend or colleague. You can bounce ideas off one another and help give each other the courage to go outside your comfort zone. If pianist Andrew Shapiro (see Chapter 10) can advance his career by performing in a McDonald’s, it’s worth it to search your community for overlooked opportunities.