Arts Activities Support

During the 2016 Fall and 2017 Spring Seasons, Patrick’s Cabaret produced 9 distinct Mainstage Cabaret events, 19 evenings of performances total, reaching nearly 1000 audience members. The Cabaret programs served a diverse community of 148 artists to present their own short-form work, including significant proportions of artists of color, with disabilities, and with queer and trans identities. Despite a year of great challenge, we did reach a number of goals, artistically and operationally, in our first year as a newly mobile organization. We produced fewer evenings of Cabaret performances than expected, producing 9 rather than the 12 distinct events we expected to produce, resulting in 19 rather than the 24 evenings we anticipated. We did produce annual returning platforms Anything But English, and CabarABLE, and even created three new annual platforms that will return in 2017 and 2018 (Lighting Rod, Controlled Burn, and My Horrifying Holiday). Our primary challenge was the wider organizational crisis of losing our building, and the subsequent loss of funding and audience. We were unsure about what our new mobile orientation would do to our business model, project costs, and results, so the 2016 Fall and 2017 Spring Seasons became laboratories to test what worked and what didn’t. We have scaled our activities to what the current staffing level can afford, which is approximately 8-10 Cabaret events in a 12-month period, which we have now newly branded our “Mainstage” Cabarets. We have also shifted to an all-Curator model, where external Curators put together Cabaret line-ups and serve as the primary community-builders of Patrick’s Cabaret’s most public program. We have continued to adapt the Mainstage Cabaret program, and are making continuous improvement. As stated, we have moved to a Curator-driven model, which will not reduce the amount of energy we spend on producing event, but will diversify participants (in the broadest sense of the word), and strengthen the pipeline of engagement of new people in our activities. We also are working to improve how we plug Cabaret participants into other parts of our programming. Overall, the core spirit of the Cabaret program initiated in 1986 continues on today, supporting the growth of artists by making the space for them to generate art that is often discouraged, quieted, censored, or (perhaps most tragically) never even considered possible in the first place. We carefully track the number and demographics of artists we engage, serving as the primary quantitative measures of our activities, and we did a good job of maintaining these records. In our proposal, we expected to engage 250 artists, and 2500 adult participants (audiences), which was based on numbers from our previous seasons’ statistics. In the end, with our programming reduced slightly, and with a significant loss of our previous audience, we supported a (still impressive) 148 artists, and attracted 952 audience members. While our footprint was reduced, we remain one of the organizations in town serving a relatively large number of artists in each annual cycle, and are unique in that we support artists presenting their own work, as much on their own terms as we can. During these seasons, the Cabarets provided an effective and impactful platform for artists to create new work, and we continue to strive to center our programs on serving artists of color, with disabilities, and with queer and trans identities. Unfortunately our programming statistics from this newly mobile period did not live up to the statistics from 2015 across the board, with a slight reduction in the percentages of people of color (-18%) and women (-15%), but did see growth in the percentages of queer artists (+21%), transgender artists (+17%), artists with disabilities (+6%), and emerging artists (+22%). Overall, our statistics still show a diverse community, well above the demographic averages for the state of Minnesota. We expect that adopting the Curator-driven model will further increase diversity, especially racial diversity. As we have sought out venues, we have made it important that they are as accessible as possible. All Cabaret performances were produced at venues where BOTH the audience areas and the stage are fully accessible to wheelchairs. It is unfortunately extremely uncommon for stages to be accessible to wheelchairs, which greatly reduces our options for venues. One venue (Intermedia Arts) also has a fragrance free restroom. We provided ASL interpretation and Audio Description at multiple performances, but unfortunately did not have many users of these services. We expect that the challenges of audiences following us to new venues is particularly difficult for audiences with disabilities.