Arts Activities Support

We had 240 total artists (73% of cast and crew) including 22 contractors and 218 volunteers who worked in various visual and/or performing arts roles. Volunteer artists included 126 adult visual artists and 69 adult performing artists, plus 6 youth (age 13-18) and 17 children (age 12 and under), representing 8 visual and 15 performing artists. Of the 22 artistic contractors, 15 also performed. Our project, entitled "You Were Once Wild Here,” was a thrillingly beautiful show that largely achieved our proposed artistic goals, with several key challenges. Though we didn't quite hit the 350+ total participants as proposed, we did have 330, including a cast of 99 (total performers) and a crew of 231 (total non-performers). These included 52 contractors (16%) and 278 volunteers (84%). Volunteers included 7 youth (3 performers) and 17 children (12 performers) – the youngest age four. Among all participants, 90 were mainly in non-artistic roles (27%), and 240 were mainly in visual or performing artistic roles (73%), with some in each. It would have been our first time staging six shows, but our second weekend Saturday show (which normally attracts our largest audience) rained out so that we only staged five. The rain-out was our first since 2009, third since 2005, and only the second we couldn't make up. Performers included 17 musicians compared to “dozens” proposed, but 82 main stage performers compared to “85+”, some of whom had multiple performing roles. These included 59 puppeteers/dancers, 21 fire performers (with 15 safety spotters) including, for the first time, two fire acrobats, as well as 10 stilters, 9 ritual performance artists, and 8 bike puppeteers. We did not have aerialists as proposed, included since 2010, due to our inability to attract a lead aerialist willing to perform in late October temperatures. We had two notable challenges involving staffing and artistic directorship. First, contractor staffing was delayed by two months and didn't start until July, so that artistic staff were not hired until after August 1st, our goal for it to have been done. This caused a cascade of delays. For example, the Staff Orientation scheduled for August 14th was not held until September 12th. Probably because some contractors were not in place for the Storyboard Process, there was no storyboard to present at the Community Kickoff on September 13th. Likely owing to delayed story boarding, we had an average run-time of 89 minutes, well past the target ideal run-time of 60 minutes that we defined in 2012, which probably lead to significant audience walk-offs on the two nights with the largest attendance. Second, staffing became rushed. We eventually hired a solo Artistic Director for the first time (instead of two Artistic Co-Directors) who, in spite of being an experienced stage director, didn't have experience directing puppetry arts or working on our production. This resulted in two serious directorial challenges, a shortfall in the capacity for attention and communication at outdoor rehearsals, and a clash of leadership style with veteran contractors and volunteers fraught with perceived communication and respect issues. The Board has since established staffing policies that favor Artistic Co-Director applicant pairs, and require any solo Artistic Director applicants to have had prior experience on the production. We had volunteer participation generally as proposed. After our volunteer count hit 250 in 2012 and 300 in 2015, it was down slightly at 278. We recruited mainly with MailChimp and Facebook, and our Volunteer Coordinator used SignUp.com for the first time to promote volunteer opportunities and schedule and remind volunteers. We again faced perennial challenges to fill some of the non-artistic volunteer roles in audience services. As late as four days before opening night, for example, urgent appeals were being sent to e-mail networks for Parking Hands and Ushers on opening weekend. For the seventh year running (since going to five shows), we had a total audience of 6,100+, down somewhat compared to the prior three years. Our shows drew an average nightly audience of 1,341 and a total audience of 6,704. This was down 1,244 (16%) from our average total audience of 7,948 for 2013-15, and was closer to our average total audience of 6,395 for 2010-12. Attendance was, in fact, extremely similar to our 2011 production, the last time Halloween fell on a Monday, which also featured a run starting on October 22nd and a very similar schedule of SA/SU + SA/SU/MO compared to FR/SA/SU/MO in 2016. After setting both opening night and weekend attendance records for the last two years, and in spite of ideal weather, opening weekend attendance of 2,081 was down 927 (31%) from the three-year average of 3,008 for 2013-15, and was very close to the 2011 total of 1,941. Reasons for lower opening weekend and overall attendance are complex. There could be a socio-cultural factor surrounding a Monday night Halloween. Besides weather, key factors influencing past attendance have likely included how early before opening weekend we issued a press release, and the amount of print, broadcast, and online media coverage the show received prior to opening weekend. In 2016, our press release went out one day past our latest date target of three Wednesdays before opening night. For the first time in recent memory, our performances received no staff interviews, feature articles, or reviews from any of the major Twin Cities mainstream or alternative news media that have covered us in the past, including Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, TPT, Fox 9, MPR, Minnesota Monthly, City Pages, and Unicorn Riot. In addition, upon the request of City of St Paul, we intentionally limited our largest two audiences to 1,800 and 1,900 by additional staffing and “at capacity” announcements at the park entrance, to significantly reduce 2,000+ bubble audiences as occurred in 2013-15. In terms of ADA accessibility, during our run 33 cars used reserved accessible parking, 116 audience used reserved accessible seating, 7 audience used ASL services, and, for the first time since we began offering Audio Description in 2011, 2 audience used AD services. We counted 515 bikes on our racks at performances representing generally 7-10% of our audience nightly and 8% of our audience overall.