Community Arts
ACHF Arts Access
Audience members will be surveyed to see that at least two facts about each of the animals focused on in performance stay with each audience member after the performance, and the audience will draw at least 200 people. Artists will be surveyed about their comfort and ability to create a quality one-person puppet show and their ability to collaborate with naturalists. Audiences of young children will be surveyed by asking them to move to different parts of the room tp answer facts about each animal, while parents will be asked to participate in a written survey. Artists will take an audience count at the beginning of each performance and give post-performance feedback on their ability to collaborate with naturalists and how comfortable they are creating a one-person puppet show.
We met all of the goals as written in the original proposal with the exception of creating “one-person puppet shows.” For the goals that we did meet, it worked well to partner with Silverwood Park as a center for the arts and environment because they helped support us in our marketing efforts. It also helped us reach an audience that would appreciate both the artistry of the puppetry as well as the information in each show about the natural world. It also worked very well for us to partner with professional naturalists when writing our productions. It helped us research each of the animals that we had selected as a show topic more thoroughly. Often, the information that we found was just as much as the naturalists knew about a given topic, but we would not have researched as thoroughly if they had not been part of the project. Work with the naturalists also helped us to embed the information more subtly into the shows. For example, one of the shows presented information about birds in its initial writing in a way where characters were reading directly from an encyclopedia. The naturalists helped us brainstorm ways to create more realistic and interesting dialogue so it did not seem like we were just dryly listing facts and information. For the goal of making “quality one-person puppet shows by developing a system for feedback and peer review throughout the artistic process,” we met the spirit of the goal as originally written. In particular, we did develop a system of feedback and peer review. We also made sure that each production was the artistic voice of one artist. However, two of the productions added an additional puppeteer, and one of the productions had a technician to run lights, so we did not follow this goal to the letter. The system of review that we set up was to make six meeting where all of us were present to give each other feedback on ideas. Artistically, this worked very well for us because it is incredibly inspiring to create work alongside other artists. It also helped for us to give feedback and suggestions for how to solve technical problems. We only faced two challenges with this project: the timeframe in which the shows were created, and we could have used a larger budget. Because of the amount of time it took for us to know that we had received the grant, many of the artists involved in the project had already booked up their schedule in the spring and summer because they primarily work as independent contractors. If we were to do the project again, we would propose a timeline in the fall/winter when they tend to have less independent contract work and more time to create. We would also find a way to expand the budget in order to accommodate hiring more artists. We would also create a take-home study guide for kids to have more thought and reflection after the shows. In the initial grant narrative we described our intended community as people who are interested in both arts programming and nature education programming. This audience is primarily the audience that we did have. We were successfully able to get this audience because of Silverwood’s focus as a center for the art and environmental education. We also defined our audience as the tightly knit world of puppetry. This is true because we did end up with members of the puppetry community of Minneapolis attend productions and give feedback on performances. The audience that we anticipated benefiting included adults between 25 and 64 and pre-K children and youth. This was true with our actual audience because of the way that we marketed the puppet shows through Three Rivers. We also anticipated that at least 200 audience members would attend over all of the performances. The final number of audience that did attend was 229, so we slightly exceeded our anticipated audience count. Our outreach efforts reflected the diversity that is present at Silverwood. We had a diversity of age ranges and we had some audience members who were primarily interested in nature education and some audience members who were primarily interested in art. We also had some who were interested equally in both art and nature. If we wanted to reach a more diverse audience in the future, then we may find a way to reach out to specific members of other communities or find a different geographic location to hold performances in order to include a more diverse audience. We met the goals of making this project accessible and open to all who wanted to participate by not charging for tickets and relying, instead, on a suggested donation for entrance to the production. If anyone would have been unable to access a production because of their inability to pay for tickets, they were able to come to these shows. In this project three new puppet shows were created and 229 audience members were able to experience the work of three different puppet artists. Also, audience surveys showed that 100% of audience members agreed or strongly agreed that they learned something new about owls, swallows, or loons, and that the performances were well-crafted, well-performed, and entertaining.
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