Arts Activities Support

Seventy-two percent of respondents enjoyed the show to the extent that they would be likely to recommend the show to friends or colleagues. 80% of key collaborating artists said felt comfortable in making decisions and taking risks regarding their artistic piece. The project team decided their evaluation objectives were to demonstrate the impact of the Palabras Project in: 1. Building a diverse audience, 2. Determining how audience members identify with the performance, and 3. giving artists a respectful and safe place to take risks. Four evaluation questions guided the project. Below is a brief overview of the responses to both interviews of artists and surveys sent out to audience members. 1) Is the Palabras Project successfully building a more diverse audience? a. Yes. Comparison data from other performances and cities indicate that the Palabras project had a relatively more diverse audience relative to the Minnesota general population and theatre projects in other states. Because this was the first showing, the data should help serve as a baseline for future performances. 2) How are audience members identifying with the stories told by the palabras project? a. Strongly identify. The data supports that a significant number of audience members strongly identified with the Palabras Project stories. Seventy-two percent of respondents would be likely to recommend the show and one-third left comments indicating that they felt the show was unique, creative, powerful, and an innovative approach to Lorca’s Blood Wedding. 3) How are the artists involved experiencing the Palabras Project? Are they feeling like it’s a respectful and safe place to take risks? a. Artists felt respected. Almost every artist explicitly indicated that they felt comfortable making decisions and taking risks. Several indicated that in a future performance, additional preparation time and direction on how pieces would be woven together would be helpful. 4) How are community partners experiencing sharing the Palabras Project with their communities. a. The community partner felt that their community was very engaged in the show, though sometimes confused as to where to go next. We experienced a great challenge/opportunity with the huge collaboration across 5 artistic disciplines (Flamenco, Mask, Shadow puppetry, Installation art and indigenous flute, and hip hop). Different art forms require vastly different timelines/modes of creation. We learned a lot about how critical it is to build a common vocabulary in order to facilitate cross-disciplinary conversation. If/when we repeat a project of this scope, we will utilize new language to get all collaborators on the same page, and implement more regular check-in moments to ensure we continue to be on the same page. We identify our intended community as: artists, community partners (such as CLUES and Neighborhood House), and audience members. We anticipated that at least half of audience-members would come from communities of color, particularly from St Paul’s Latino communities. We expected a portion of our audiences to be representative of the Twin Cities’ average theater-going community, which is primarily upper middle class Caucasian women older than 55. Collaborating artists and actors were to be primarily of-color, with focus on providing opportunities to Latinos. We are proud of the artistic impact of our project. All in all, we employed 42 artists, most of whom had never set foot in Park Square previously, 33 of whom were of color. Four of our five primary artists were all Latino/Hispanic/Chicano identifying, and the fifth was Spanish. According to our demographic survey, sixty-nine percent of respondents identified as Caucasian, seventeen percent considered themselves Hispanic or Latino, and three percent identified themselves as Asian. Ten percent of responses fit their own category including identifications such as Italian, Eastern European, and Arab. However, we only received a 21% response rate to our survey, and we believe that we reached more audience members of color than the survey indicates. The data appears to support that the Palabras Project successfully built a diverse audience considering the general population demographics and comparison examples. While the percentage of attendees for the Palabras Project who identify as white, not Hispanic (69%) is larger than the percentage of individuals who live in Minneapolis or St Paul and identify as white, not Hispanic (60%), the gap in who attends a performance is lower than in other performances and cities. While only one community partner was available for a post-show interview, the feedback can be used as a starting point. The community partner was interviewed about their experience with the project. Key Takeaways: 1) The community partner invited mothers from her preschool group and a senior’s program. 2) Because going to a production at night was a challenge, we provided a bus to transport people to the show. This was incredibly helpful for the partner’s community. 3) From the partner’s perspective, the community felt very engaged by the show. According to the partner, community members were excited and felt that the music and the art was great. That said, there was some confusion and potentially a little too much walking for the seniors that attended. Attendees got lost throughout the project and did not fully understand that they had to continue moving. Although we had wheelchairs available, and designated seating for the mobile performance, there were still audience members who were confused, or didn't feel the experience was physically accessible. We will address this challenge in our next production through more careful communication with audience members.