The haps

Hello, there, friends. I'm sorry I've been such a negligent blogger - things have been busy, both in and out of the Festival offices.

There are two exciting bits of news from behind the curtain (so to speak) - the first of which is that we put the finishing touches on our Festival Guide and sent it off to the printer. In order for that to be accomplished, all of our programming information - showtimes, venues, ticket prices, show "blurbs", names of performers and directors and designers, producer and sponsor credits, etc. - had to be finalized, edited, and proofread at LEAST seventeen times for all shows, Live Arts and Fringe alike. Things got pretty hectic - many of the staff were staying until all hours of the night to fine-tune every word and date and time and ad placement. But now that's done, and the guide is somewhere (Indiana, I think - of all places!) getting printed, all 91,000 copies of it. It'll make its debut both at a members-only happy hour and at Philadelphia's First Friday night in August.

And after getting all that information under control, we could move on to the next step -- selling tickets! Advance tickets for select LiveArts shows went on sale to the general public on July 20th, and tickets for all other shows will go on sale on the internet on August 1st. Since we're still very much in planning mode here in the office, it's been hard to get a handle on how close the festival actually is - but this is definitely making it all seem more real. Opening night is five weeks from yesterday!

A lot of what I've been doing lately has been helping the staff start to get ready for the festival itself. August is crunch time - there's a TON of planning and setting-up to be done in the next few weeks. Today, I helped format Fringe show descriptions to go on the website (right now, all you can see are the Live Arts shows), and did some work organizing artist travel information. Many of our Live Arts acts are local, but the majority are from out of town, and it's our responsibility to get them here, whether that means booking a train from New York or coordinating flights from Poland and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It's also starting to hit me how bizarre the timing of my stint here is - although I'm here for the bulk of the planning, my last day of work will be 5 days before the Festival opens. Of course, I'm planning on coming in and helping out, but it seems strange that I won't really get to fully participate in this experience that I'll have been gearing up for for ten weeks. Oh, well - I guess it's probably pretty important that I, you know, start my senior year of college. Probably.

NEWSFLASH!

Red Bull's "Mobile Energy Team" just descended on the Fringe offices and handed out free Red Bull to everyone out of Red Bull can-shaped cooler backpacks. Programming Manager Pia Agrawal's (Haverford '05) reaction: "YURGHHHH THIS TASTES LIKE DYING!" (not that this has in any way affected her finishing the whole can)

Heightened levels of productivity and concentration are expected for the next 3-4 hours. Either that, or Pia will start doing laps around the office.

Week three! The festival is still a long way away (August 31-September 15!), but preparations are really picking up. Most of this week (and a bit of next) was/will be spent putting the final touches on the festival guide, which entails coordinating, verifying, and proofing information on every single act in both the LiveArts and Fringe festivals. This process has actually been a lot of fun -- it feels good to be working on a real, concrete product, and as a pleasant side effect, I've gotten to be a lot more familiar with the acts that will be involved in the festival, especially on the LiveArts side of things. One of the distinguishing features of many of this year's acts seems to be LENGTH -- there are quite a few shows that run 4+ hours, including:

-Festival of Lies/Le festival des mensonges, performed by Faustin Linyekula and dancers from Les Studios Kabako. The group will perform several standard-length (think: two hours or so)
evening performances, and then culminate their LiveArts run with a 6-hour, 11pm-5AM free-form collaboration with Philadelphia-area musicians, complete with food and drinks.

-Gatz, performed by Elevator Repair Service, a theater troupe from New York. This is one of the LiveArts acts that I'm most excited about -- Gatz is, essentially, a full reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, set in a modern-day office. The main character comes in to work one day, and begins reading the novel aloud -- as he gets deeper and deeper in, his coworkers begin transforming into the characters in the novel, and everyday office events into wild West Egg parties, etc. There will be a couple of two-night split performances (Part I one night, then Part II the next), but it will also be performed a couple of times in its full-length, 7-hour incarnation, complete with dinner break.

-No Dice, performed by Nature Theater of Oklahoma -- who are, ironically enough (or perhaps so ironically that it's not at all ironic anymore, hmmmm?), based in New York -- which is an original play composed of bits and pieces of telephone conversations held by members of the theater company, edited together into a 4-hour "exercise in 'non-literary' theater." This sounds really awesome to me, but that could be just because I'm so charmed by their faux-handmade website. Who knows?

There are many more festival acts that I'm excited about -- and I'm sure I'll be filling you in on them as weeks progress. In the meantime, you can check them all out at the LiveArts website.

Archibald the Gray: a fellow to know

This is my aging but steadfast computer-steed, who I have (just now) dubbed Archibald. Archibald and I have spent quite a bit of time together over the past week and a half, and he and I, after a slow and halting start, have finally reached a tenuous agreement, the conditions of which are as follows: I don't do more than one thing at once, and he doesn't spontaneously shut himself off. If anyone was ever uncertain about whether or not arts nonprofits receive sufficient funding, faithful Archie here would be a large piece of concrete evidence for "not."
What have Archie and I been doing, you may be wondering? We have been ENTERING DATA, the best part of every internship ever. The shows for the "Fringe" half of the Live Arts/Fringe equation* were finalized this week, and I spent a lot of time entering every artist (and there's about 150 of 'em!), venue, and showtime for every show into a large database shared by many theater and performing arts organizations in Philadelphia (part of list visible at right).
But that's over now, and the future is looking bright for good ol' Arch and I. I got started on my first long-term project today, which looks to be much more exciting than the past few days have been. I sat down this morning with our marketing director, Heidi, and Adam, a graduate student who's been doing audience research for us, sponsored by a Fels fellowship. As it turns out, despite the fact that there are over 300,000 college students in the greater Philadelphia area (the second-largest concentration of students in the US, after Boston), very few of them are attending Fringe and LiveArts events. So, one of my jobs will be to do some research into how I can attract area collegiate types to Fringe events -- this will include contacting area universities, researching marketing techniques, etc. I spent most of the afternoon poking around on the internet, seeing what I could find out, and it turns out that the "18-24 demographic" is "notoriously difficult" to market to. I'll keep you posted on my progress.
I also attended my second-ever staff meeting today, where we went over the timeline for the summer (we're almost on schedule!) and discussed such sensitive internal matters as who is or is not doing their dishes in the break room. The most exciting part of the meeting, however, came in the form of guest Matthew "Matty" Hart (www.mistermatty.com), non-profiteer and co-founder of Spiral Q Puppet Theater (www.spiralq.org), who's been working on a plan to reinstate an office of arts and culture in Philadelphia. This seems to be a particularly pressing issue given the Philadelphia arts scene, which I would describe as both "hopping" and "booming", and I encourage all of you, but particularly those who vote in Philadelphia city elections (if there are, in fact, any of you who do) to keep an eye out for mentions of both the office and Matty himself in the upcoming mayoral election.
Anyhow, that's all for now -- I'll post again soon!

*And a final note, before this entry gets heinously long: the distinction between the "Philadelphia Live Arts" festival and the "Philly Fringe" festival is the following: the Live Arts festival is curated and sponsored by our office (with the help of innumerable foundations, corporate sponsors, etc.) -- acts are invited, and paid, to come to Philadelphia during the festival and perform, and we find them venues and supply everything they need in the way of publicity, tech support, etc. The Fringe, on the other hand, is made up entirely of self-produced, self-promoted shows, in the style of the original Fringe Festival in Edinburgh (www.edfringe.com). Our office helps them with ticketing and publicity (to a certain extent), but the performers themselves are responsible for finding a venue, all technical considerations, etc. They pay a fee to participate, which covers (some of) our offices coordinating costs and buys them a place in our festival guide.

And so it begins...

Hello, inter-land! I'm Liz, and I'll be your intern-guide to the fascinating and frantic world of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe for the summer. I'm a rising senior at Haverford, and I'm spending 10 weeks with the festival thanks to the generous support of the Hurford Humanities Center at Haverford College.
I just got back to the country a couple of weeks ago (I spent this last year in Paris), so I didn't start working until Monday. The first few days have been pretty uneventful -- I've been getting to know the rest of the office staff, as well as my fellow interns, and doing some odd jobs, like adding photo credits to pictures that will eventually end up in the festival guide, and assembling a huge press release mailing going off to media outlets far and wide, and ranging in size from small local papers (the Chestnut Hill Gazette!) to major nation-wide press like MTV and the New Yorker. I sat in on my first staff meeting today, which gave me more of an idea of what the rest of the summer's going to be like -- it looks as though I started working right as things start heating up.
I'm going to keep this short, and post again soon with more about the festival and what I'm doing there... I hope with lots of good pictures and links to artists' websites. In the meantime, you can head over to www.livearts-fringe.org to learn a little bit about the festival!