Arts Activities Support

535 audience members attended all of our performances spread across 8 different nights. 96% of audiences reported having a positive experience at the performance. We're even happier to report that 94% of audiences reported learning something new about the issues and topics on which we presented far exceeding our pre-show estimate of 70%. After an extraordinary season of laughter around political issues, The Theater of Public Policy achieved all of the goals it set out to accomplish. Overall, we encountered far more strengths than challenges in this process finding many of our strengths were the result of thoughtful planning and intentional follow-through with a clear focus on defined goals. One of the goals for which we’re most proud is paying our performers for their time and talent. Working artists are often sidelined or expected to offer their art for the love of it without financial compensation. While our artist cost comprises the largest portion of our budget, we're thrilled that we can offer pay rates that match or beat much larger theaters. As we undertook this project, one of the biggest unknowns was bringing in outside artists to participate in our show. With few precedents for bringing different mixed media artists together to create art for one production, we faced the challenge of figuring it out without much guidance. While a challenge, it was also an amazing opportunity to create a model that would suit our needs and reflect our unique creative vision. We invited 8 different regional artists to create works of art inspired by what happened onstage. They created works using markers, watercolors, broken glass mosaic, chalk, pencil and more. While artists mentioned that the subject matter, time limits and live event structure made the opportunity challenging, these constraints pushed them in ways that they valued and all found the overall experience positive. Other arts organizations have contacted me about how they might do something similar at their events. With a limited marketing budget, our ability to devote resources to social media outreach is extremely valuable. To bring diverse communities to our shows, we sent hundreds of personal invites to people and organizations that are stakeholders in these community issues. While not every invitation was accepted, plenty were which allowed us to have the experience of audience/panel Q and A reflected in the artistic process. While many theater companies may explore a relevant community issue in one production, we were able to cover eight very different topics in one season. We featured varied guests including Lt. Governor Tina Smith, Minneapolis City Councilman Abdi Warsame, Reps Pat Garafalo and Frank Hornstein, former Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak exploring issues such as affordable housing, water quality, small town vitality, the history of Minneapolis skid row and the proposed sandpiper pipeline. Overall, we focused on issues facing communities on a neighborhood, city, state and national level reflecting where we’ve been while thinking about how to make our future better. Pushing our success further, repeating a run of shows would have us asking how can we be more relevant to the community and how can we involve artists in new ways that expand their role in the show. The answers would be the basis for future goals. Through intentional planning to ensure those in the house saw themselves reflected in the audience, we succeeded in reaching our intended community with both onstage cast and audience participants. Though not always perfect, when we did encounter a challenge, we made adjustments to ensure our future work was better. Using post-show surveys to gauge new learning from show content, we can emphatically say we reached an audience that was unfamiliar with many of these issues. In several cases where people reported minimal learning from show content, they indicated that they worked closely with the issue on a daily basis so felt they would be comfortable talking about it on stage. While our style of performance is surely on the fringes of political discourse, we do hope that we are reaching people making decisions. Our show was built around the idea that there are not wizards behind the curtain, but we do acknowledge that there are decision makers who go to work every day to make policy happen. This season in particular, we feel strongly that we reached not only political outsiders, but the political class itself. Among those in attendance were city council members, the CEO of the largest affordable housing provider west of Chicago, current and former Minnesota legislators and others. We make a big deal that political people are just like everyone else, but these attendees did humble us. The estimated populations benefiting from our performances were consistent with the actual demographics. Amongst all shows, in total, we had 17 different on stage performers and 8 visual artists. One audience member raised the issue of gender diversity as they were disappointed that the show they attended had only one female performer that night. Yet, the week prior we had four women performers and only one man. From this we learned that it's not just important to have a diverse cast in aggregate, but to make it a priority for every show. As we recruited visual artists to create during our show, we didn't simply contact our own favorites and close friends. We leveraged our networks and used social media to spread the word that we were looking for interested artists. There was no application process or form to complete; all who wanted to participate would be considered. This exposed us to a wide variety of artists for which we had no prior knowledge and gave them a fresh challenge and space to exhibit their work. We continue to make the audio from our shows freely available online. Each show is archived on our website in perpetuity. By offering material online, we have been able to satisfy the content requests of those that were unable to attend live. Since submitting our original grant proposal, our online audience has doubled meaning the number of people accessing our shows online is more than actually attend in person. We are thrilled with the ability to reach more people either through participation in live shows or through accessible online content.