Latest / Arts Unscripted with Monica Holt / CI to Eye | BONUS: A Continuation, Not a Phase

Transcript

CI to Eye | BONUS: A Continuation, Not a Phase · Arts Unscripted with Monica Holt

• 0:08
  Hi everyone, it's Christopher Williams.
• 0:11
  The arts world is driven by passion and purpose,
• 0:15
  and many of us are dedicated to addressing injustice and
• 0:20
  inequity in all that we do, whether through programming, marketing,
• 0:24
  or behind the scenes. But even with our best intentions,
• 0:29
  our industry faces real challenges in achieving lasting change.
• 0:34
  We strive to be more inclusive to open doors to new voices,
• 0:38
  but the path isn't always easy.
• 0:41
  Boards and longtime patrons can resist programming or messaging that
• 0:46
  feels unfamiliar,
• 0:47
  and progress can be frustratingly slow when an organization lacks the community
• 0:51
  connections or resources to support these efforts. In today's episode,
• 0:57
  you'll hear how one symphony is holding itself accountable to its mission and
• 1:01
  values around representation, access, and equity.
• 1:05
  We're sharing never-before-aired insights from a conversation recorded earlier
• 1:10
  this year between myself and Rachel Hagemeier from the Canton Symphony
• 1:14
  Orchestra. Rachel discusses the Symphony's podcast, Orchestrating Change,
• 1:19
  and the shifts it has sparked within the organization.
• 1:22
  She also shares how the Canton Symphony is building a new model for community
• 1:27
  connection and accountability in the arts. Let's take a listen.
• 1:40
  Rachel Hagemeier, welcome to CI to Eye.
• 1:42
  Thank you. Very excited to be here today.
• 1:45
  I'm so eager to talk to you,
• 1:47
  and I also come from a similar part of the world.
• 1:51
  I'm from southwest Missouri, kind of in your neighborhood.
• 1:55
  Yeah.
• 1:55
  I think we also have being a high school drum major in common.
• 1:58
  Oh yeah. High school drum majoring. It never leaves you.
• 2:01
  Very important formative roles in our leadership.
• 2:05
  Yes. Oh, for sure.
• 2:07
  So you host your own organization's podcast called
• 2:12
  Orchestrating Change to address issues of equity, diversity,
• 2:16
  and inclusion in the industry.
• 2:18
  Tell me more about what you're trying to achieve with that,
• 2:19
  because it's work that so needs to happen.
• 2:22
  The idea for the podcast came from our director of marketing and development,
• 2:25
  Nathan Maslyk, back in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd took place,
• 2:30
  and we saw tons of orchestras make beautiful statements and we said,
• 2:35
  great. We could do a statement.
• 2:36
  Is there something though that we could do to hold ourselves accountable?
• 2:40
  And so publicly talking about it and publicly giving
• 2:45
  limelight and airtime to people who represent minority
• 2:49
  backgrounds and are doing the work successfully in the field already,
• 2:54
  who are already doing way above and beyond what most
• 2:59
  orchestras in America are doing-if we can talk to those people,
• 3:02
  they're going to fuel our ideas.
• 3:04
  And maybe there's some stuff that we can't implement in Canton,
• 3:06
  but it's going to keep it top of mind for us.
• 3:09
  We wanted to keep this conversation as a throughline so that
• 3:13
  our DEI committee on the board could have things to think about.
• 3:17
  And we talk about race, gender expression,
• 3:21
  socioeconomic status, gender, all sorts of stuff,
• 3:24
  but also physical disability and deafness, blindness,
• 3:28
  all these different things. There's so much in the DEI world that needs our
• 3:32
  attention,
• 3:33
  and so doing that podcast-we're in season five now.
• 3:39
  It's just a joy to talk to these people. I mean,
• 3:42
  we've gotten to have Dashon Burton on the podcast.
• 3:45
  Grammy Award-winning Dashon Burton. Jeff Scott, also Grammy Award-winning.
• 3:49
  And so many other people, like Sara Davis Buechner,
• 3:52
  a transgender pianist who played with Canton pre-transition and
• 3:56
  post-transition. Our former music director, Gerhardt,
• 4:00
  was one of the few conductors who programmed her after her transition.
• 4:05
  Now she gets programmed a lot more, but in the early days.
• 4:08
  Listening to her story and the way that she navigated that whole experience.
• 4:12
  And it has led to a lot of different things at the symphony.
• 4:17
  Our involvement in the Sphinx Organization and their SOPA auditions that they
• 4:21
  do, and trying to bring musicians of color onto the stage.
• 4:25
  We still have a long way to go with that. We're not a very diverse orchestra,
• 4:28
  but we're better than we used to be.
• 4:29
  We talk a lot about equity of music access in the community,
• 4:34
  so we started a free strings training program in Southeast Canton through
• 4:39
  Lighthouse Ministries. Southeast Canton is considered a food desert.
• 4:42
  There's no gas stations. Victim of redlining. Very poor area.
• 4:46
  The history of Southeast Canton is devastating to read.
• 4:49
  It was all blighted for an industrial park that was going to go in that
• 4:54
  never opened. So how can we bring access? Well,
• 4:59
  we have a ton of violins hanging around and we'll just give them free lessons.
• 5:04
  It's only 12 students, but now they're joining our Youth Symphony program.
• 5:08
  It's been so wonderful to have that podcast and to do it,
• 5:12
  and I've learned so much, and I never want to stop doing it. Now,
• 5:15
  whenever I'm having a bad day and I'm like, "I'm too busy,
• 5:18
  we have to record a podcast episode, I'm too busy"-afterwards I'm always like,
• 5:21
  "That was the greatest. I feel so refreshed now.".
• 5:23
  I know. Yeah.
• 5:25
  It's really, really nice.
• 5:27
  Oh, that's great.
• 5:28
  I can imagine that there are so many people that love the podcast and love what
• 5:32
  you're talking about on the podcast,
• 5:34
  but did you face any challenges in some of the discussions that you were having?
• 5:39
  The board understood it. We kind of decided as an organization, okay,
• 5:43
  what are the things we need to do to make sure that we're actually doing this
• 5:46
  work?
• 5:47
  So we decided every MasterWorks concert has to have a composer of color or a
• 5:50
  female composer. All of 'em. We have to. And that's not just to check a box,
• 5:53
  that's to hold ourselves accountable to make sure we're programming it.
• 5:56
  We can program more, and we try to, and we do, but if we don't do that,
• 6:00
  we're not doing our jobs.
• 6:02
  And so the board was on board and the staff gets it,
• 6:06
  and our guests are amazing,
• 6:08
  and we've been challenged in conversations with assumptions that we
• 6:13
  have and identified a lot of gaps in our own knowledge and
• 6:17
  biases we didn't think we had.
• 6:20
  We did get some pushback from our community.
• 6:23
  We got a letter about how we were being racist to white people, which was...
• 6:29
  You just look at it and go, okay. And you just toss it away.
• 6:31
  Because you don't need to have that conversation. But the thing that
• 6:37
  is hard for us is there's so much we want to do
• 6:42
  that we can't. We don't have access to the materials that we would need.
• 6:47
  We don't have the money that we need.
• 6:49
  We don't have the space or the connections in the community because Canton's
• 6:54
  pretty small. There's lots of stuff that we want to do right now,
• 6:58
  but it takes a lot of planning and time.
• 6:59
  And so the amount of change I would like to see happen is not happening at the
• 7:04
  rate at which I would like it to happen,
• 7:06
  and it's just about patience and working hard and being
• 7:11
  uncomfortable and continuing on and doing that cycle forever and ever.
• 7:16
  Because we were having a conversation with one of our guests in the first season
• 7:20
  where he said,
• 7:22
  "I remember back in the 1980s when I was on a panel about diversifying
• 7:26
  orchestras. And then I remember in the early two thousands when I was on a panel
• 7:30
  about diversifying orchestras. And then here we are again." And he said,
• 7:34
  "It's been a fad. It's been a cycle.
• 7:36
  It's been something that pops up every once in a while." What do we need to do
• 7:39
  to make sure that this has staying power and that it's not just a phase.
• 7:43
  And it's a little concerning.
• 7:46
  A study came out about the number of composers of color that were programmed
• 7:49
  went from like 0.4% to 9.4%.
• 7:53
  That's a big change. It's still only 9.4%,
• 7:56
  but when looking at the seasons upcoming, it went down.
• 8:00
  And so how do we keep reminding orchestras that there's
• 8:05
  room for Beethoven and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor? You can do both.
• 8:09
  Jessie Montgomery is alive and well,
• 8:13
  and she's maybe available to come to your concert if you play her music.
• 8:17
  There's a lot of reminding that this is not a phase.
• 8:21
  This is continuation. And that's I think maybe the hardest thing.
• 8:25
  I think you're doing the Lord's work by talking about these kinds of issues on
• 8:29
  your podcast,
• 8:30
  and I think it can be challenging to talk about some of these things when you're
• 8:35
  in any part of the country. For example,
• 8:37
  I'm sitting in the very progressive eastern part of the country,
• 8:41
  and I know where you are sitting. And so I'm wondering,
• 8:43
  does the geographical environment that you find your organization in,
• 8:48
  does it make it harder to address some of this?
• 8:50
  Or do you feel like it's not a problem?
• 8:54
  In certain ways. I think that...
• 8:58
  We just did a Gospel joint symphony concert, and it was so fun.
• 9:01
  And our audience was the most diverse audience we've ever
• 9:06
  had. I've only been there for five years, but oh my gosh. I was like, well,
• 9:10
  this is like I'm in a Baptist church on Sunday.
• 9:13
  This is a very different experience than we've ever had at the symphony,
• 9:18
  and it was super fun.
• 9:19
  And doing concerts specifically for demographics of people that have been left
• 9:24
  out of the concert hall is a part of what we want to do.
• 9:26
  We did a concert last fall with The Labra Brothers for Dia de los Muertos that
• 9:29
  was all Hispanic punk fusion music with orchestra,
• 9:34
  and our audience was mostly Spanish-speaking.
• 9:38
  So I introduced the concert and then one of our board members, Joanna,
• 9:41
  introduced it in Spanish because most of the audience didn't speak English. Now,
• 9:46
  those two concerts sold a lot less tickets than almost everything else we did.
• 9:51
  Is that because the demographics of people that those concerts
• 9:56
  were for don't see our marketing in the traditional ways? Is that because we
• 10:00
  need to shift the way that we think about ticketing and getting the word out to
• 10:05
  those people? Or... why wasn't our traditional audience there?
• 10:10
  I'm not doing a Gospel joint symphony just for the Black community.
• 10:16
  It was a little sad that a lot of our traditional audience wasn't there.
• 10:19
  So what can we do to do content that, yes,
• 10:23
  maybe it's focused on the Black Gospel experience,
• 10:27
  but our whole community is curious and interested about it.
• 10:31
  And in the same token, what can we do to make our,
• 10:34
  it's not targeted to the black community. It's just a MasterWorks concert.
• 10:37
  There happens to be a Black composer on it, but that's not the focus.
• 10:40
  The focus is the music. How can we make our orchestra a space that the Black
• 10:44
  community would want to come to that concert?
• 10:46
  And so I think that is a really interesting challenge for us.
• 10:51
  Canton is pretty siloed when it comes to different communities,
• 10:54
  and there's still a racial tension.
• 10:57
  We had a really hard incident with the police and a Black man dying recently in
• 11:02
  Canton. Very,
• 11:03
  very George Floyd-esque to the exact words that he was saying,
• 11:07
  George Floyd-esque.
• 11:09
  And so there's a lot of really difficult things like that happening.
• 11:14
  And so as a symphony, where's our place in that conversation?
• 11:18
  And by having this podcast and talking about these issues when it comes to
• 11:23
  racial issues and diversity and lack of diversity,
• 11:27
  that I think we get a lot less pushback from. People just say,
• 11:31
  it doesn't apply to them. I don't need to go to the Gospel concert.
• 11:34
  It's not for me. I don't need to engage in that thing. It's not for me.
• 11:38
  I see.
• 11:39
  I don't have any conversation.
• 11:41
  We do get some pushback when we talk about gender expression and LGBTQ+
• 11:46
  issues. Our music director is gay,
• 11:51
  and he didn't come out publicly until... Well, he was out publicly,
• 11:56
  but to our community, his bio didn't mention his fiance.
• 12:00
  He didn't tell the Youth Symphony students. Because when he did say it,
• 12:04
  we had Youth Symphony students quit because their parents were scared of the
• 12:08
  fact that he was gay. So, but in the same token,
• 12:13
  we went to Pride. We go to Pride. We have our Pride, we do a petting zoo,
• 12:16
  and we're at Pride and we have a great time. We have violins out and people can,
• 12:20
  like a petting zoo, but an instrument.
• 12:22
  And we're there with Youth Symphony materials and Matthew's there.
• 12:26
  And we had kids join Youth Symphony because they saw us at Pride,
• 12:29
  and we have a transgender student in Youth Symphony who now is going off to
• 12:33
  college for music because he was able to feel comfortable at Youth Symphony. So
• 12:38
  in the same token though, then we have those beautiful moments.
• 12:42
  So the pushback is minimal.
• 12:45
  I think what it is is just the community that we're in,
• 12:47
  where is our place in this conversation in the community?
• 12:49
  We're an arts organization. Do we even have any place?
• 12:52
  And I think the answer is yes,
• 12:53
  but in a very different way than our prosecutor is going to talk about things,
• 12:57
  than our legal system is going to talk about things.
• 12:59
  But we do have a place at that table,
• 13:02
  and how do we make sure that we're there in a way that is authentic to who we
• 13:05
  are and how we can impact is kind of the difficult thing now.
• 13:11
  I don't know if you ever saw this piece of research from Colleen Dilenschneider,
• 13:14
  who-essentially it was to say that our audiences actually
• 13:18
  do look to us for a point of view on these kinds
• 13:23
  of issues, which is interesting. I think for a long time,
• 13:28
  perhaps your Gen X or Boomer peers, Rachel, would've said, "Well,
• 13:32
  we absolutely cannot participate in a conversation of this nature," which...
• 13:36
  it's not true anymore. And I think people like you are absolutely...
• 13:40
  It's probably a deal breaker for you to not participate in these kinds of
• 13:44
  conversations. Though you might do it in your own way, you're going to be there.
• 13:48
  Yeah, I mean, I do still think-and this is where I find I get scared,
• 13:53
  and it's like, okay, if we say this thing,
• 13:55
  how is it going to impact my donations?
• 13:56
  Of course.
• 13:57
  Which is like, that's a bad thing to think.
• 14:01
  I understand.
• 14:01
  But when I'm person looking at the budget and realizing I have a $274,000
• 14:05
  deficit that I need to fix,
• 14:07
  if I lose my big old conservative donor, what do I do then?
• 14:12
  But then I remember too, I worked for the Oklahoma City Ballet for a summer,
• 14:17
  and I remember the artistic director at one time remembering a donor
• 14:20
  conversation he had where the donor was like,
• 14:23
  I'm going to give my amount a year, however much it was. And then he said,
• 14:27
  but I would give more if the tutu's were a little shorter.
• 14:30
  There are certain things that you have a duty to stand up for.
• 14:33
  You have to stand up for your dancers because that's inappropriate and you don't
• 14:36
  get to boss us around in that way,
• 14:38
  and your donors should not dictate the organization.
• 14:41
  They should support what the organization is doing.
• 14:43
  Anytime we do need to get vocal about something and say what we believe,
• 14:47
  because I want the musicians who play on stage to feel comfortable being a part
• 14:51
  of this organization.
• 14:53
  I want everyone in the audience to feel comfortable being here.
• 14:56
  So what can we do to make more perspectives feel like they have a
• 15:00
  voice?
• 15:02
  Yeah.
• 15:02
  I think one of the things I try to do for myself and even for our clients [is],
• 15:06
  when you stand up for the disenfranchised and you perhaps risk
• 15:11
  losing a donor,
• 15:13
  who else is inspired by that action and is going to come to the table for the
• 15:16
  very first time? They see your bravery and they say that.
• 15:18
  Absolutely. And we show up at Pride.
• 15:22
  And now suddenly now we have a huge supporter from Mr. Craig
• 15:26
  Covey who is a gay man who supports. And he was like,
• 15:30
  this is amazing. I love what you're doing.
• 15:34
  And now is a huge supporter of the symphony because we started engaging.
• 15:37
  So we're not going to necessarily... we might -- maybe we lose someone,
• 15:41
  but we'll maybe gain a huge amount of people that we didn't even,
• 15:46
  that didn't feel comfortable before. And now they do.
• 15:48
  Yeah. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. Well, Rachel,
• 15:51
  this has been such an enjoyable time spent for me.
• 15:54
  Thank you so much for spending time with us today.
• 15:57
  Thank you. This was wonderful. I am so happy to talk about this topic, and yeah,
• 16:02
  it's been a really fun little afternoon here with you guys.
• 16:13
  Hello, everyone. Dan here, back with more CI-lebrity Sightings.
• 16:17
  Here's our roundup of CI clients making the headlines this month. First up,
• 16:21
  the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art is closing its physical doors only to open
• 16:26
  some new ones.
• 16:27
  The museum is kicking off a fresh chapter as a global institution with touring
• 16:31
  exhibitions and an expanded online presence. To commemorate the occasion,
• 16:35
  Gothamist profiled a longtime docent as he bid a bittersweet farewell to his
• 16:40
  home away from home. Next,
• 16:42
  the Times of San Diego reported that after two years of renovations,
• 16:46
  the San Diego Symphony has finally reopened its Jacob's Music Center.
• 16:50
  They celebrated with a full day of musical performances and of course,
• 16:53
  a brand new look. And finally,
• 16:56
  BroadwayWorld published the nominees and winners of the 2024 Joseph Jefferson
• 17:00
  Equity Awards honoring the best in Chicago theater.
• 17:03
  We couldn't be prouder to see so many CI clients on the list.
• 17:07
  Major applause to Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre,
• 17:10
  Mercury Theater Chicago, and the Guthrie for being celebrated.
• 17:14
  Congrats to all these organizations for keeping the arts fresh, exciting,
• 17:19
  and tuned into what communities need right now.
• 17:22
  Got a story that deserves a shout out? Well, tag us on social and let us know.
• 17:38
  Thank you for listening to CI to Eye.
• 17:40
  This episode was edited and produced by Karen McConarty and co-written by Karen
• 17:44
  McConarty and myself, Dan Titmuss.
• 17:46
  Stephanie Medina and Jess Berube are CI to Eye's designers and video editors,
• 17:51
  and all work together to create CI's digital content.
• 17:54
  Our music is by whoisuzo. If you enjoyed today's episode,
• 17:58
  please take a moment to rate us or leave a review.
• 18:01
  A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover CI to Eye and
• 18:05
  hear from experts in the arts and beyond. If you didn't enjoy today's episode,
• 18:10
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• 18:15
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• 18:20
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• 18:23
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• 18:26
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• 18:29
  Until next time, stay nerdy.