Rural and Community Art Project Grant
Rural and Community Art Project Grant
Icebox Radio Theater plays for 2020 season.
Tara Makinen: Executive Director of Itasca Orchestra and Strings, musician; Amber Burns: choreographer, dancer, actor, middle school art teacher; Tammy Mattonen: visual artists, co-founder of Crescendo Youth Orchestra; Kayla Aubid: Native American craft artist, writer, employee at MacRostie Art Center; Ariana Daniel: mixed media artist, arts instructor; Kathy Neff: musician, Director, Fine Arts Academy at the University of Minnesota-Duluth; Ron Piercy: jeweler, gallery owner; Emily Swanson: arts administrator at Oldenburg Arts and Cultural Community.
Ariana Daniel: mixed media artist, arts instructor; Patricia Canelake: visual artist; Roxann Berglund: musician; Serenity Schoonover: writer; Greg Mueller: sculpture artist; David Dobbs: visual artist, Education Coordinator at MacRostie Art Center.
ACHF Arts Access
As with all our seasons, our goal for this season of plays is to see both artistic and audience growth. Audience growth will be determined by listener statistics (downloads and streaming listens) which is information provided by our podcast server, Spreaker.com plus an audience survey at the end of the season. We will judge artistic growth by a combination of feedback from our actors and artists, and feedback from our audience. Specifically, we are looking for all parties to gauge how successful they thought the season was in reaching the goal of creating great audio drama. Spreaker.com, our podcast host, provides numbers on downloads, and online listens for individual plays as well as series. This will easily allow us to measure whether or not our audience is growing. The second way we will judge our audience response is through online forms. We will create a Google form then invite audience members to log onto it and answer questions about the episodes we produce and what kinds of plays they would like to hear from us in the future. It will include a series of statements which the survey taker will be asked to rate his or her agreement with from one to five, five being ?Strongly Agree' and one being ?Strongly Disagree'. Finally, we also seek input from our actors and artists about their experience working with the Icebox Radio Theater. Most of them have been with us for several years so their input is very important, especially as we try new things.
In our artistic goals, we said this season would feature a return to stories about the Northland, but take and apply what we'd learned about sound design from the previous season. We also intended to focus on character more than situation. We feel we achieved both these goals. The season, which was titled ?Frozen Frights: Aurora Borealis? is deep and complex while still being very entertaining. We dealt with such subjects as mental health and even did an episode about the quarantine, a fact we're very proud of considering the issue of Covid-19 had not even become known when the season began. As for sound design, we feel we took a solid leap forward in our artistic development. Unlike a movie which tells a story in a series of scenes usually begun with a series of images establishing time and setting, audio has the freedom to move within the minds of the characters and establish emotion directly.
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