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Organization Name: University Musical Society
Department Submitting Recipe: Education & Community Engagement
City: Ann Arbor
Program Name: Breakfast Download Discussions
Time of Program: Mid-morning on Sundays
Program Length: 90 Minutes
Goal: To bring together adult audience members after a dance performance to debrief about the performance through simple movement exercises and discussion. The format provides casual social space (with food and drink) that allows audience members to express themselves, hear the opinions of others, and become more comfortable in talking about dance.
Time of Year Offered: Throughout the season for select performances
Program Description:
We host “Breakfast Download Discussions” typically on Sunday mornings after a performance run by a particular company. The intention is to create space for any audience member who has seen a company during the week to join in a facilitated experience that leverages both simple movement exercises and discussion prompts. The experience is co-moderated by two local teaching artists who lead the group through a pre-planned series of activities that guide the group in experimenting with thick description, interpretation, and kinesthetic learning. Typically this is not an artist-focused event, though artists sometimes do participate in the guided activities along with audience members (but it is important that visiting artists understand that the teaching artists are “in charge.”) The facilitation design is such that audience members are encouraged to reflect freely on the performance with other audience members. We moved the program to Sunday morning because, in previous years, we found that hosting debrief sessions immediately after the performances made the entire evening very long and most of our audience members were not willing to commit to a longer evening. The previous iteration of this program (from EDA Round 2) was called “Dance Club.” The “Breakfast Download” concept was an attempt to iterate the “Dance Club” model of facilitated conversation after dance performances.
Number of Participants: As few as 5 and as many as 50 people.
Target Audience: Adult community members who have attended the performance and are seeking out a group for post-show conversation.
Private/Public Public
Nature of Audience Engagement: The audience engages in this program by listening to each other, moving and dancing themselves, asking questions, socializing with other audience members/teaching artists/visiting artists, and eating and drinking. The following is a detailed sample agenda for a typical program: UMS Breakfast Download after Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company’s “Untitled Feminist Show” Detailed Agenda Setup notes and material needs
Location: In a large meeting room adjacent to the venue. The room should be flexible with movable tables and chairs. The room should be set up to allow for tables and chairs on one end and open movement space on the other. It’s most optimal to have a room with a wood, marley, or tile floor to allow for easy movement.
How Many Staff: Typically we have 1 administrative staff person managing logistics (sign-in, catering, room setup), 2 teaching artists who act as co-moderators and assist in setting up the room for their activities, and 1 student volunteer to assist the administrative staff person.
Program Cost: We provide an honorarium for each of our teaching artists ($250 per artist), catering (bagels, donuts, coffee, and fruit for 30 from Panera at about $800-$1,000 per event), and we have an in-kind rental agreement for space (valued at about $600 per event).
Marketing for Program: We promote the event in our season brochure at the beginning of the year, and then subsequently in all marketing channels (social media, website, email marketing, pre/post-show emails to ticket buyers, postcards, monthly calendars, within the program book, and in print and online advertising). Occasionally we will do targeted marketing to specific community groups that might have a unique interest in a particular artist.
Cost for Program Participants: Free and open to the public.
Attendance To Date: 20
Past Iterations: We held 4 Downloads in the 2015-2016 season.
What works? We believe that we devised a really successful and engaging facilitation model. The model combines quick response, thick description, kinesthetic exploration, and discussion in ways that are accessible and inviting to a general audience. We have honed this model through a number of different programs (including “Night School” and “Dance Club” which can be found elsewhere in the EDA Cookbook). Key to our model is using discussion as an endpoint, rather than a starting point. We almost always begin with movement and work towards discussion. We have found (sometimes surprisingly) that given a supportive and non-judgemental environment general audience members are very willing to engage in simple movement exercises, and, over time, facilitators can move audience members towards more complex movement (tableaux or moving across a room). We have also been impressed by how audience members are able to remember, recall, and reproduce movements from dance productions (even our visiting artists have been impressed). This recall and reproducing of gestures from the performance are excellent ways of remembering and reflecting on the performance that don’t come through discussion alone.
What doesn’t work? We struggled with participation on Sunday mornings. We found that audience members in our community don’t want to join an activity on Sunday morning. Perhaps this is understandable given that Sunday mornings are typically quiet time for families and others, and that many attend church or other kinds of gatherings on Sundays. Though we believe in our facilitation model and the quality of the experience for participants, it was, simply, very hard to recruit participants despite our best efforts. Not to mention, too, that Sunday mornings are also hard on staff who typically work most evenings and weekends throughout the season.
Performances Where Offered: We did not offer this program for all dance performances. We offered this program only for companies who presented shows on the weekend and usually shows with multiple nights so that we could leverage participation on Sunday morning.
Past Research on Program: Given the low participation in this particular program, we did not conduct formal research on this iteration. We have done research in the past on “Night School” and “Dance Club” using the “Intrinsic Impact Survey” created by WolfBrown. This survey tool can be licensed by arts organizations for a nominal fee to conduct audience research. You can see the results of that research in the EDA Cookbook entries for “Night School” and “Dance Club.”
Continuing Program? Though we believe in the quality of the experience, we will not be continuing the program in the future due to low attendance.
