The artistic director of the Signature, James Houghton, expressed a slightly different view –– describing the $15 season as a “home run” in terms of bringing in new, excited audiences, but, in some sense, only a temporary step. The term that’s always thrown out, by the sponsors and often by the arts organizations, is “audience building.” The president and chief executive of City Center, Arlene Shuler, has said that audience surveys show that people who come for the $10 series come back during the regular season and pay full price. simply by helping create an environment where art can be perpetuated, where art can be nurtured, that benefits a company like ours.” “I don’t know that there’s any way we could guarantee that the next Spike Lee or Tony Kushner is going to appear based on something we invested in. “What we’re talking about is a long-term investment in community,” Mr. This is not to say that the programs are strictly results-oriented. We have to make sure that the audiences are there, and that the talent exists to tell the stories that these audiences want to hear.” “We are a company that produces content and that disseminates that content. Osheyack said Time Warner’s arts activities are closely connected to its purpose as a business.”There’s a solid business reason for everything that we’re doing, and that’s tied to developing new audiences and developing new talent,” he said. Time Warner’s vice president for marketing and arts development, Dan Osheyack, explained that the corporation decided recently to refocus its arts philanthropy around three major goals: broadening public access to the arts, supporting arts education (including funding 17 after-school programs for teenagers from public schools), and strengthening diverse voices in the arts, by giving general operating support grants to small, community-based theaters, like the Classical Theater of Harlem, the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn, and Manhattan’s Repertorio Español (which presents plays in Spanish). Just as corporations bring in best-selling authors to instruct their employees about how to “think outside the box,” they believe exposure to opera or theater or classical music or a museum will awake their employees’ inner innovators. And a relationship to local cultural organizations stimulates –– or, at least, executives convince themselves that it stimulates –– creativity and innovation (those buzzwords of the late 20th century) in the workplace. It’s good for their relationship to the community they’re seen as responsible and civicminded. “It helps them attract and retain employees, which is a big issue this days,” the president of BCA, Judith Jedlicka, said. Marks Jewelers, of Houston Lincoln Financial Group, of Philadelphia the PNC Financial Services Group, of Pittsburgh and Sabroso Company, of Medford, Ore.īusinesses adopt these practices because it benefits them. Boeing, in Chicago the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in Fort Worth, Texas HCA, in Nashville, Tenn. Bison Financial Group, in Lafayette, Ind. The other companies honored were: Advanta, in Spring House, Pa. (August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” began previews Tuesday, having already extended its run twice.) Last night at the Hudson Theatre, the Business Committee for the Arts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to spurring business support for the arts, honored Time Warner, along with nine other companies around the country, for its innovative forms of support. It also subsidized the 15th anniversary season of the Signature Theatre Company, allowing all seats to be priced at $15. The corporation has been for three years a leading sponsor of City Center’s Fall for Dance series, for which all tickets are $10. In this country, a leader in the practice has been Time Warner Inc. It may be slightly unsettling to old-school bohemians who believe that true art always stands at an angle to mainstream culture, but recently the most promising strategy to emerge for making performing arts affordable is corporate partnership, in which businesses buy, or subsidize, a whole run or season of tickets, which can then be offered to the public at a discounted price. And once they get going on possible ways to offset them, the next topic that comes up is corporate sponsorship. When theater professionals contemplate the declining influence and popularity of the theater ––serious theater, not jukebox musicals –– they talk mostly about one thing: high ticket prices.
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