Buttermilk & Molasses

Second Arts 'n' Culture Blogger Luncheon

Back in the early summer, John Bryan of the Arts Council of Richmond, invited a couple of dozen local bloggers to lunch. His intention was to do this on a regular basis, as a way of getting the word out about his organization's resuscitation (it has been renamed CultureWorks) and to act as a conduit of sorts for news-oriented bloggers.

A second lunch was held this past Friday, drawing a smaller crowd, and Harry Kollatz proved that he can thread a story out of straw over at Richmond Magazine's Daily Tip Sheet. Of course, Harry took notes, which is always helpful.

The main thing I remember was the physical shock I experienced when I discovered that Bryan, who has been in the thick of Richmond's art community for decades, had no idea who Dave Brockie is. (Note to RVANews: Bring Brockie to the next lunch.)

The afternoon started with a bit of an inquisition by Style Weekly's new arts and culture editor, Don Harrison, who most bloggers know as one of the scathing pens behind Save Richmond and its years-old efforts to hold the CenterStage project accountable. Don politely hammered Bryan about the composition of CultureWorks' new board and his perception that it was light on actual artists; Bryan listened, responded, and asked Harrison to hold his fire until the board was officially announced later in the fall -- and until the organization had a change to prove itself.

Here's a bit of Harry Kollatz's take on the lunch:

This afternoon, I had the unique privilege of dining with several fellow bloggistes and members of the reformed Richmond Arts Council, now CultureWorks, which operates under the capable and visionary guidance of John Bryan, himself a writer and artist.

Bryan has orchestrated periodic assemblies with people who write about the town in various capacities and in diverse communities to discuss the best ways to make arts and culture connect with the city, from City Hall to the people in the street.

The major reason for the meeting was the introduction of Brooks Smith — writer, historian and WCVE personality — as chairman of CultureWorks' board of directors. That body is still a-borning, and the announcement of its members will be made on or near Oct. 6. You'll be able to read more about Smith in our editor-in-chief's Q & A with him in the October issue of Richmond magazine.

The mission of CultureWorks will not be to produce or present, but instead to facilitate and support a vital component of the city's life; that is, the makers and creators. If you doubt the value, do as Richmond's Mayor Jones did this past First Friday and see the 6,000 or so people who'll turn out in good weather to promenade along Broad and its tributary streets to visit the galleries and restaurants (many of which exist because of First Friday). Or see the people lining up at The National (without much in the way of adjacent parking, by the way), or attend the InLight event later this month.

Style Reports on Mayor's First Friday Olive Branch

In the wake of a summer filled with arts vs. bureaucracy news coverage, Mayor Dwight Jones appears to have drawn a more friendly line in the sand for area art galleries, according to Style Weekly's Chris Dovi. It started with a September 1 meeting between the mayor and Christina Newton, director of Curated Culture, which sponsors the popular First Friday art walks on Broad Street. It continued with Jones' walking tour of the event this past Friday.

Newton finally got the answers she’s been looking for, she says.

“The organic nature of First Fridays’ growth has brought these challenges,” Newton says, but “we had a very positive meeting and the city is going to assist our organization and the downtown businesses in facilitating special-use permits for the downtown events.”

In a nutshell, Jones’ team sensed an unfortunate face-off between one of the city’s most positive cultural events and modern code and fire safety applied to a half-dozen blocks of 60- to 100-year-old buildings.

Last week, Jones reiterated his pledge to support the event. At the meeting — also attended by the mayor’s chief policy adviser, Suzette Denslow, Fire Chief Robert Creasy and acting Chief Building Commissioner Ray Abassi – the new chief administrative officer, Byron Marshall, laid out the bones of a three-tiered approach to handling the issue.

The first step was Jones’ appearance at last week’s First Fridays, a clear sign that the city has no plans to endanger the event with overeager code enforcement. The next step, Jones spokeswoman Tammy Hawley says, will be issuing special permits to allow certain businesses to exceed occupancy limits during First Fridays.

Light Up Your Life with a Lantern at InLight II (the Electric Boogaloo)

Its inaugural year wasn't a washout, but there was a lot of rain creating ambiance for the first InLight Richmond street-level illumination-in-art event last year.

Organizers are hoping for a dryer canvas for their second, larger event. It's going to litter Broad Street with light during the weekend of September 25:

InLight Richmond is an exploration and celebration of contemporary art free of charge for the whole community. Facades, walls, storefronts, doorways, parking lots and other unexpected places will be transformed by 27 international (US, Australia, Canada and Germany) emerging and established artists with video projections, sculptures, installations, multi-media art works and performance arts.  Guest juror Adelina Vlas, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, selected the artists from the 65 submissions received from all over the world. The juror also selected four proposals to be considered for a permanent art installation.

It all starts with a Community Lantern Parade, and operating under the misguided assumption that every Richmonder doesn't have an artistically crafted lantern handed down to them from one of the wars the folks at 1708 Gallery are offering a series of lantern making workshops. Taught by four different, kick-ass artists.

The workshops will be held during the last 2 weeks of August at 1708 Gallery.  Taught by four diverse Richmond artists - Sarah Hand, Matt Lively, Noah Scalin and Paul Teeples - the workshops will feature four unique lantern making methods.   No special skills or previous art experience are needed, just a willingness to explore the creative opportunities in our everyday world.

Classes will be held for kids and adults, and they are expected to fill up super-fast. Noah will be hosting workshops on recycled light. Paul's focus is on punch-tin lanterns (in case you lost the family heirloom). Sarah will be teaching participants to make glimmering orbs, and Matt will be instructing on paper house lanterns. There is a fee for the workshops -- but you get light refreshments, a kick-ass lantern and a chance to hang out with the cool kids. Register now.

Arts in Crisis: Sure, You're Struggling. Deal with It.

It appears that Michael Kaiser's appearance in Richmond yesterday went unnoticed by most of the region's residents, and that's unfortunate for the hundreds of cultural organizations in Central Virginia.

Kaiser, the president of the Kennedy Center and author of The Art of the Turnaround, was in Richmond as part of a 50 state tour focused on "Arts in Crisis." I live blogged the event as it happened, and am providing a more detailed summary here.

His message was simple enough. It came in three parts:

1. Arts and cultural organizations are struggling.
2. This is only partly due to the recession.
3. Deal with it.

Actually, Kaiser wasn't quite that matter-of-fact, but he was close. And his message was well-received by the crowd of several hundred artists, staff and board members representing dozens of the area's arts and cultural organizations.

I'll tackle the gist of Kaiser's very important message -- vital for every organization, whether they are cultural or business, nonprofit or corporate. And then stay tuned for a bit of tooth-gnashing, focused at the event management side of things.

Kaiser started the morning with a startling message -- cultural organizations weren't struggling because of the economy, but because they have essentially priced themselves out of the market. The recession has exacerbated the struggle, he continued, and too many organizations are taking a very predictable path -- cutting programming and marketing.

While cost management matters, especially now, Kaiser suggests that competing harder and smarter is going to keep the best organizations from being culled from the cultural herd.

During the first 17 states he's visited on his 50 state tour, Kaiser says the trend toward cutting back has been obvious -- smaller plays, smaller exhibits. And much less planning.

"You have to plan your art well in advance. I plan my art five years in advance," Kaiser said. Before joining the Kennedy Center, Kaiser was executive director of the Royal Opera House in the United Kingdom, and previously the American Ballet Theatre and the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Foundation. His first cultural turnaround was as general manager of the struggling Kansas City Ballet.

Kaiser told the crowd that better art is the outcome of better planning, and advance planning helps with fund raising. "I'm raising funds now for 2015," he said. "You aren't."

Planning also allows for collaboration -- effective collaboration requires time to reach agreements, work through contracts, learn to work together -- and big projects. Kaiser believes in the power of big initiatives: "When we do something big and special... the community notices," he said.

Kaiser spent most of his time -- at the request of moderator Bill Martin of Valentine Richmond History Center -- walking the audience through his "10 Rules of the Turnaround," which he said applied to any organization.

You can read the 10 rules and much of Kaiser's commentary on them in the live blog, but I'll tackle a few highlights here.

"You can't save your way to health" and "Extend your planning calendar" went hand-in-hand as two of the more compelling messages.

He said he doesn't mean not to save -- "I squeeze a nickel until the buffalo poops," he said, laughing. "But waiting every year for someone to die" and leave you their cash is bad planning. Most organizations that are struggling, he continued, don't know how to raise revenue.

One way to raise revenue, he suggested, is to extend your planning calendar -- "How can you plan your fund raising if you don't know what the art you're raising money for will be?

Hence his fund raising for 2015 reality.

One suggestion that raised some eyebrows -- in the room and afterward -- was that organizations should "focus on a donor level that makes sense to your organization." He continued this thought during a Q&A session later in the morning when he told a playwright to focus her small organization's energy on foundations and individuals -- "the people who come to see your work." He added that he felt too many small organizations relied too much on institutional giving.

That matches my experience consulting with small businesses and nonprofits. The conversation I have with clients isn't to ignore institutional giving -- a big check from Target or Altria can transform an organization -- but to understand the power of the individual donor, and structure your board and organization to connect at that individual level.

It usually starts by revisiting your vision, mission and strategy -- the very things Kaiser mentioned in his second turnaround rule ("The leader must have a plan."). It's often followed by revisiting your board (Rule #9).

It is some of the hardest work a fledgling organization will ever do, and it's exactly the work that separates those who thrive and those who fall. Self-serving as it sounds, hiring a strategic planning consultant is probably the smartest dollar a small organization can spend.

Kaiser had plenty to say about boards, and about Richmond's failure to market itself nationally. (I'd argue the real failure is marketing itself locally, but they're both important.) Read the entire summary at the live blog post.

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Unfortunately -- after live blogging the event -- I heard from many organizations that they hadn't heard word one about Kaiser's visit. I only learned of it because I hadn't gotten around to removing myself from the Virginia Commission for the Arts email list.

I discovered today (after scanning the TD for a story on Kaiser's appearance in town) that local media wasn't even informed until Monday that Kaiser was speaking. Given the media coverage he's gotten in other cities for one of the more important public talks I've heard in some time, that's inexcusable (if accurate). As I mentioned earlier, Kaiser's key messages are essential for our community.

A final gripe: The event wasn't even wired. I'd arrived early planning to live blog and tweet the highlights, only to discover that my iPhone got zero coverage in the sub-level meeting rooms at the Marriott -- and that getting access to the hotel's wireless (outside of the lobby) rang in at a chummy $200 per day. Let me repeat that: $200 friggin' dollars a day. Not an hourly rate -- a daily rate. Since it wasn't part of CenterStage's contract for the event (they were the organizer), the Marriott management suggested I put it on my personal credit card.

Or I could quietly hack into their network and pirate some bandwidth. Thanks for making that part of the day easy, Marriott IT staff.

Performing Arts in the Cross Hairs this Week

With the clock ticking down and the city girding itself in anticipation for the opening of the sadly named CenterStage performing arts center, two local bloggers have hit the Internet with competing posts worthy of Brutus and Mark Antony (Shakespeare, not pop music, kids).

Save Richmond seized a predictable opening with news this weekend that former Times-Dispatch columnist Roy Proctor had a parting of ways with CenterStage over the content of a coffee table book he had been commissioned to write. Originally slated to find itself wrapped by the chimney with care this Christmas, the book will have to find itself another author.

Will Jones at the Times-Dispatch broke the news -- if a former reporter and a PR hungry arts center doing a piss-poor job at contracting over work, and utterly misunderstanding why they might have totally different agendas is news:

"I could not possibly have adhered to those things because I would have been falsifying history on a monumental scale," said Proctor, who retired in 2004 as an arts writer and critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Foundation officials insisted they are not trying to rewrite history but said the draft was too much a summary of newspaper articles and void of the anecdotes of performers and shows that had been part of the initial pitch for the book project last summer. Proctor said he considered conducting extensive interviews but decided to work largely from newspaper clippings.

"We are not trying to falsify history, change it," foundation spokesman Jay Smith said. "We felt the manuscript provided was incomplete" and inappropriate for a keepsake book.

"We didn't hire him as a journalist," foundation board member Susan Fitz-Hugh added. "We hired him as an author."

This was prime fodder for Save Richmond which quickly hit the Internet with a "Can't Rewrite History" post (more a culling of Jones' TD piece) that captures the essence of some of the anti-CenterStage vitriol out there:

How going about things the wrong way can poison what may have started out as a noble effort. Critics of CenterStage are not against the arts or kids or old people or sunshine, but rather how the Foundation’s leadership have comported themselves and wasted public money.

Save Richmond's Don Harrison has been tireless in his documentation of the countless times the CenterStage (formerly Performing Arts Center) project has stumbled in recent years -- pricked by countless self-inflicted wounds along the way.

Sadly, Proctor was hired to write a fluff piece, not a critical history.

Style Weekly's Jason Roop captured the essense of the CenterStage fumbles in a series of Twitter posts over the weekend (@StyleWeekly had a lively exchange about the Proctor gaffe with @aarondotson, @sarvay, @jonnewman and @LaDIFF this past Saturday):

@LaDIFF @sarvay @aaronsdotson How is it not news? This was a major project the foundation planned and pitched stories to media about! 10:48 AM Aug 8th from TweetDeck

@LaDIFF @sarvay @aaronsdotson Plus, now there's no book to go along with the opening. It's an embarrassing botched project. 10:50 AM Aug 8th from TweetDeck

@LaDIFF @sarvay @aaronsdotson If that's not news, how about there's no executive or artistic director or full season 30 days b4 opening? 10:51 AM Aug 8th from TweetDeck

Leave it to the new blogger on the street to throw his body in front of the speeding train of criticism. One Way Richmond got its cultural angst on last night with a lengthy, sometimes rambling, and occasionally pointed post defending CenterStage, "Fuck culture, I've got comic books":

When folks say 98% of Richmond will not support it, I suddenly remember folks saying 99% of Richmond will not support The National. Um, The National is on a roll. Sell out after sell out after sell out. Remember when ‘they’ said nobody will come down to ‘First Fridays.’ Oh the laughter. Richmonders are still gun shy about Six Street Market Place. I get it. But I live downtown. It is a new day down here folks. Using parking, black people, or the fact it’s to expensive as excuses just doesn’t cut it anymore.

The Performing Arts Center has had it’s issues. Of course it has. What do you expect from something conjured up by Doug Wilder a.k.a Thug Wilder. The meals/sales tax put on local restaurants in order to pay for this site was unfair. I am simply arguing the fact that now that it’s built, it will succeed. Everyone, including detractors has stated how beautiful the site is, and how well the site meshes the new with the history.

Now that "Serious Fun" is almost upon us, it looks like the proof may well be in the pudding. If they eat pudding at the opera.

(I'll be scurrying around backstage at the end of the month getting a behind-the-scenes tour of CenterStage. Keep an eye out for a snarky, but honest, appraisal of what your meals tax has purchased for Richmond.)

An Evening at Morton's: I've Been Promoted

On Tuesday, I was planning to quietly sit behind the scenes at the second Evening at Morton's event, live blogging from the relative safety of my MacBook while The Hodges Partnership's (THP) Josh Dare threw down with five players from the local cultural scene.

Things have changed.

I'll now be at the grown-up's table, facilitating the dialogue. Tony Scida from THP will be live blogging. (Join Tony as he provides sound, color and commentary at the Evening at Morton's site starting at 6:00 on Tuesday. And submit your questions to him as the evening goes on!) And Jonah Holland will be live tweeting. (Follow the hashtag #steakchat starting at 6:30 on Tuesday.)

Here's the description floating around:

On Tuesday, July 21, Morton’s The Steakhouse will host its second “A Evening at Morton’s” online discussion. “An Evening at Morton’s” discussion series assembles Richmond-area experts to discuss a range of issues over dinner.

This discussion will focus on the topic “Arts in Richmond: Culture at the Crossroads.”

• Janine Bell, founding president and artistic director, Elegba Folklore Society

• David Fisk, executive director, Richmond Symphony

• Ana Ines King, founder and artistic director, Latin Ballet of Virginia

• Harry Kollatz, columnist/staff writer, Richmond Magazine, and co-founder of the Firehouse Theatre Project

• Christina Newton, founder and director, Curated Culture

NOTE – this is a virtual event!

This is a virtual event -- you can follow along with the written commentary via the blog and the Twitter feed. Video and audio of the entire conversation will be posted later in the week.

You can submit questions to me via the Evening at Morton's Facebook page. I'll ask the tough ones of the panelists during the evening.

An Evening at Morton's: When Art and Red Meat Collide...

About the time I launched Floricane, my strategic planning business, I found myself sitting around a table with some folks from The Hodges Partnership (THP) brainstorming new community conversation ideas centered around Morton's the Steakhouse, which is a client of THP.

In short order, we'd come up with a nugget of an idea -- five or six people around a table, discussing issues of the day. We also surfaced three topics that seemed broad, but interesting -- sports in Richmond, arts and culture, and the nonprofit community.

We had no budget to go along with our ideas, so we improvised our way through the first event, which was held in April and focused on sports in Richmond.

We started with an idea of trying to partner with public television to make it a live broadcast -- five cultural figures engaged in a hearty discussion over steak, crabcakes and asparagus. Done well, it could be something straight out of TBN. Budgets and time got in the way.

What we ended up doing was utilizing Twitter and live blogging and audio recording as a way to promote the event and create a space where the public could participate -- listen in, read along, add their comments, submit their questions.

It was a moderate success.

Next Tuesday, July 21, we go back to the table:

Large or small, contemporary or classical, Richmond’s cultural institutions share many of the same issues and challenges. Just how are the arts in Richmond confronting such difficult economic times? On July 21, Morton’s The Steakhouse will bring together five local experts for the second in a series of community conversations, “Arts in Richmond: Culture at the Crossroads.”

The Evening at Morton’s discussion series brings together Richmond-area authorities to opine on a range of issues over dinner.  The arts discussion participants include:

• Janine Bell, founding president and artistic director, Elegba Folklore Society
• David Fisk, executive director, Richmond Symphony
• Ana Ines King, founder and artistic director, Latin Ballet of Virginia
• Harry Kollatz, columnist/staff writer, Richmond Magazine, and co-founder of the Firehouse Theatre Project
• Christina Newton, founder and director, Curated Culture

The conversation will be “live-blogged” by John Sarvay, a local blogger and founding principal of Floricane, LLC, and moderated by Josh Dare, a principal with The Hodges Partnership, a Richmond-based public relations firm.  While the actual dinner at the restaurant is private, Richmonders can participate in the discussion and ask questions to the participants here on the Evening at Morton’s blog.  The blog feed will go live at 6 p.m. on July 21.  The conversation also will be audio recorded and made available on this site following the event.

THP has launched a Facebook event page for the second Evening at Morton's event, where you can register, get updates and be reminded about the event before it starts and after it concludes. Unfortunately, this is a virtual event -- you can enjoy it from the comfort of your laptop, but not from the dining room at Morton's. The live blogged portion (that I'll be manning) can be seen either at the Evening at Morton's website or at Buttermilk & Molasses starting at 6:00 -- and you can submit questions directly at that time.

Jonah Holland will be live tweeting with the hash tag #steakchat.

In the fall, we'll be back with another Evening at Morton's event focused on how the nonprofit community in Richmond is growing, struggling and reinventing itself.

Gallery 5 Takes the Lead on Cultural Revolution

If our city had a cultural pope, I'd ask her to grant sainthood to Gallery 5's Amanda Robinson for waving a banner for cultural renewal and revolution in Richmond.

It's no secret that Gallery 5 has been a labor of love for Robinson and her cohort of friends and supporters, and that is has been a hub for a rich scene of artists of all sorts. The historic firehouse has been part of her family for generations -- as a place to work, a piece of property, and a home of sorts. Lately, it's been ringing a five alarm bell to gain the attention of Richmonders interested in the preservation and enhancement of Richmond's rich cultural landscape.

The timing is ripe.

From the ill-conceived, ham-handed efforts of Richmond's otherwise useful Community Assisted Public Safety (CAPS) program (check out Style's attention-grabbing cover story from May for details) to recent discussions about the city's admissions tax, bad policy and fiscal laziness is fast colliding with a resurgent belief that arts and culture are not only vital to Richmond's creative legacy but to the health of its urban fabric.

In recent comments at Buttermilk & Molasses, Robinson wrote:

I am not going to take my aggression out on CAPS, because I know that they are here to insure the safety of our community, and of course, to enforce that we pay the city every penny in tax money owed, even if they feel some of these taxes are doing more harm than good. Our arguments always take us back to city-council. If you have been in this city for more than 5 years, you would know that dealing with city council, is like dealing with a room of 4 year olds. You will fight the same fight for years, and very seldom see any change.

She has since followed up with a series of posts at Gallery 5's community blog, focused on beginning to craft a clear message to City Council on what a vibrant cultural policy might look like in the City of Richmond:

It is time to start compiling a list of important questions and concerns regarding Richmond's cultural future to submit to our city council. We want your questions to focus on the problems in our artistic community.

After attending this past CAPS meeting, we know that if we want to see any major change, we must approach our city council. We all know how long it takes for anything to get accomplished in that council, so lets start now!!

If there are codes/laws that you feel are outdated, too severe, or unreasonable in any way, please send along. If you have questions regarding taxes, CAPS enforcement, code violation, etc, lets get cracking. If you feel that the city is killing our culture, then tell us how!

Amanda Robinson is making a difference in Richmond. Head over to her community blog and share your ideas on how we can make a difference with City Council on our cultural and creative future.

Richmond's Great Rock and Roll Swindle

In a meeting about the Richmond Region Cultural Action Plan yesterday, I heard that representatives from the city and various organizations had been engaged earlier in the day in a discussion about Richmond's moderately absurd admissions tax -- essentially, a 7% exercise in pickpocketing as Richmond.com's F.T. Rea explains:

"It" is the seven percent tax The City of Richmond extracts from every dollar for an admission ticket that changes hands within its boundaries. Richmond’s "admissions tax" comes off the top of the gross, before any other splits or payments are made.

Now, in this time of upheaval and change, some progressive thinkers in Richmond are zeroing in on how to allay the admissions tax The City collects from the Byrd Theatre, the Siegel Center, Poe’s Pub, and every business in town that sells tickets or collects a cover charge at the door. 

By the way, Chesterfield County and Henrico County don’t have such a tax. Which means movie distributors know it’s usually better for them to ship a print of their feature film to a cinema house in the suburbs.

During yesterday's discussion, a couple of interesting anecdotes were shared.

The first was that the Byrd Theatre essentially needs to sell an extra 5,800 tickets every year to pay the admissions tax. For a movie house with one screen that seats (at most) twice a night, that's at least 10 extra tickets for every movie they show.

The second was a little more abstract. If a promoter was bringing a $1 million show through Virginia, he'd make $70,000 less in Richmond than in Charlottesville or Norfolk -- all things being equal. Guess where he's not likely to spend too much time haggling for dates?

Rea has a few more facts:

The admissions tax in Richmond is not unique. Unlike, Charlottesville, most cities in Virginia have such a tax; the rate varies. Which only means backward thinking exists in lots of places.

By the way, there’s no admissions tax in Austin or Nashville. In those two cities, known for their great live music scenes, the thinking appears to be more enlightened than what has prevailed here.

Richmond took in $2,447,670 in admissions taxes in 2008. No doubt, any spokesperson for The City will say Richmond needed that money.

Meanwhile, Gallery5's Amanda Robinson is about to have an aneurysm over on her Facebook page. Here's the string of Facebook updates she posted after receiving notice from the City of Richmond that Gallery5 needs to pay the city 7% of each show by the 20th of each month, or risk being shut down:

I can keep silent no longer. If my organization goes down because of our greedy city, we will go down with pride. Our city is supposed to be supporting its Historic Landmarks, instead it took a struggling non-profit gallery to try to keep our landmark standing. Now, the city wants to charge us for not being up to code, not paying specific taxes that we should not be paying anyways, and other fees....

...associated with the upkeep of our space. They want US to pay THEM??? My ass!! They want us to pay them a % of our shows under this Admissions Tax Law, when no one gets payed in our space and we can barely keep our head afloat. This admissions tax that is lumped in with the....Meals Tax?? Did you know that a large % of our meals tax was taken from the homeless... to allocate to... CENTERSTAGE????

No wonder, our city is now hassling all of this struggling businesses, restaurants, bars, venues, non-profits, etc and trying to get us to give them MORE money. I say NO! I say that our city government, not our tax payers, struggling non-profits and historic buildings should pay for their sketchy business practices.

I cannot keep my mouth shut. I have been volunteering for 5 years to an organization that started JUST because our city would not support one of its own Historic Landmarks. Instead of helping us, they are penalizing us even more. Why don't you fix the history that you have, instead of giving more money to muddy our future?? HELL NO. NO MORE. There may be no more G5 after this year, thank our city for that.

Looks like CAPS isn't the only thing keeping artists down these days.

It sounded -- during yesterday's discussion -- like the city was serious about exploring changes to the admissions tax, but that there was a fair amount of research and studying planned before it went to City Council or the Mayor's Office.

Given the mood in the culture community, it might be a good idea to fast-track this one.

What Theatre Owes the Community, and Vice-Versa

Hats off to Bruce Miller for what promises to be an interesting series of posts at the Barksdale Theatre Blog focused on the responsibility of local community theatre -- with an emphasis where it belongs, namely on the word "community".

Theatre prompted many a spirited gathering at the well in days BC just as it encourages vigorous water cooler conversations today. Theatre is not elitist and never has been. It’s populist. And theatre companies, especially nonprofit theatre companies, belong not to the select few, but to the community-at-large.

It follows then that each nonprofit theatre has a responsibility to be accessible to the broadest possible audience—welcoming everyone, excluding no one. This is an easy tenet to write into a vision statement or embrace as a core value. But on a day-to-day basis, a commitment to accessibility is devilishly hard to put into action.

Miller says that Barksdale focuses its energy on creating movement in five areas -- leadership, programming, financial roadblocks, physical barriers and broad-based marketing. He promises to tackle each of those areas in the coming days on the blog.

It would be even more fascinating to see the broader cultural community wrestling with those same issues, and inciting some long-overdue conversation across the Richmond region about what it means to be part of the community.

It's a conversation that too many other segments -- business, educational, government -- view far too academically these days. The community deserves a better dialogue, and it would be fitting if it were launched from the one segment that thrives on engagement.