Rural and Community Art Project Grant
Rural and Community Art Project Grant
Icebox Radio Theater Fall 2020 Series.
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; 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.
Tammy Mattonen: visual artist, co-founder of Crescendo Youth Orchestra; Roxann Berglund: musician; David Dobbs: visual artist, Education Coordinator at MacRostie Art Center; Greg Mueller: sculptural artist; Leah Yellowbird: multi-medium visual artist.
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 producing great audio drama. Spreaker.com, our podcast host, provides numbers on downloads, and streaming 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 audience surveys. We invite audience members to log on to a Google form 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 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 as we try new things.
We feel we met all the goals set out in our grant proposal. We did engage our supporters with requests for comments and a series of poll questions which indicated they were interested in series set in the Northland, and that science fiction was a popular genre. The actual production of the shows basically met our plan though some changes had to be made to accommodate the Covid-19 pandemic. We recorded in the home of Jeffrey Adams, and made a point of recording each actor separately, by themselves, in the studio. This is a technique we would not use normally. Though it makes acting more challenging, it did keep everyone safe. As completion of the recording sessions in November 2020, no person who participated in the project had come down with Covid-19. The story we told was a science fiction thriller, though we decided against incorporating holiday elements which had been the original plan.
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