Here’s news from our own studio: we’ve been selected to co-lead a “Burning Issues” session at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in January. Approximately 6,000 delegates from performing arts presenters, artists, and agencies come to New York’s Hilton Hotel for selling, meeting, and seeing showcased work. Working with the musician Jean Cook of Future of Music, we have been asked to create a session (2-2.5 hours) on the artistic challenges and opportunities of our new digital and web-based world.

There are three main themes in this year’s APAP gathering: Creativity and Innovation, Sustaining Ourselves, and Building Participation. Our task is to fold the experiences of personal and new technologies into these broader themes. My goal is to create a session that puts the themes into action: create, innovate, sustain, and build participation with everyone in the room.

What do you think we should do? What’s the most important trend or tool to introduce and examine? Who should we invite to join us to be part of the session?

Think about it this way: rather than collecting individuals to share their own specific stories of digital immersion, what are the philosophies - the actions of innovation - that are inspiring the arts and creating momentum in the digital marketplace, in the performance hall, and in the studio?

Last year’s conference took place just as we were bringing KadmusArts online. For everyone who sends in an idea for our session, you receive an invitation to our first anniversary celebration.

- Bill Reichblum

Quick - name the only actor who worked with Nicholas Ray and Wim Wenders on Lightning Over Water and John Hughes on Home Alone (the first and the second). Add to this the fact that he was a founding member of Andre Gregory’s Manhattan Project, and is now often seen on television’s Law and Order.

Gerry Bamman is having that rare kind of acting career - success across theatre, film and television, and in wildly different kinds of projects in each medium.

Bamman has received the Obie and Drama League awards, as well as a Drama Desk Nomination for best featured actor for his performance as Richard Nixon in Nixon’s Nixon, a performance that will be seen again this fall in New York. As a founding member of the Manhattan Project, Gerry was in one of the foremost experimental theater companies of the 1970s. Led by Andre Gregory, their production of Alice In Wonderland was performed over 500 times in New York and at festivals around the world.

In this interview, recorded outside the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where Gerry is currently performing, he talks about his approach to different kinds of work, revisiting roles, and how an actor creates.

This week Ana Maria Harkins is interviewed about KadmusArts by Jim Henderson, host of the podcast Saint Kermit. Saint Kermit is a weekly program dedicated to insightful political commentary, interviews, music, and the Boston sports scene.

To listen to this interview, click here - Ana Maria’s segment begins at 14:07, and runs until 28:27.

We are always on the look-out for the latest in festival fashion, fun and frolics.

A couple of weeks back, we brought you the coolest way to get to a festival: Olivia’s car. Olivia has taken the spirit of festival life and applied it to her daily journeys. The car is an ongoing work of art with the participation of anyone who wants to add their own artistic signature (word, drawing, quotation, or new phrasing of what’s already there). Wherever it is driven or parked, the car brings a smile.

Here’s another reason to smile: 10,000 audience members will create a work of art by recycling the garbage generated during a festival.

The Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival has a green solution to the garbage generated by the audiences at the festival. Last year, 40 tons of garbage from the festival was put in a landfill. This led Tartan Heart’s Joe Gibbs to think about how to honor the beauty of their festival site and extend the festival’s celebration of art.

This year, during the festival, audiences will be encouraged to recycle. The recycled waste will then be used in the creation of a work of art. The artwork will be the onstage backdrop to the festival finale.

Isn’t that great? Go see art; go have fun; go make art.

A perfect way for festival art to create, inspire, and make the earth a better place.

- Bill Reichblum

Haresh Sharma is the Resident Playwright of The Necessary Stage, and Co-Artistic Director of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. He has written more than 50 plays which have been staged in Singapore, Glasgow, Birmingham, London, Dublin, Cairo, Melbourne, Busan, Seoul and New Delhi. He has been awarded fellowships and grants by the British Council, the United States Information Service and Asia-Europe Foundation, and was conferred the Young Artist Award in 1997. Among his published collections of plays, Still Building was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize and the Singapore Book Prize. His play Off Centre has recently been selected by Singapore’s Ministry of education as one of the literature texts for both O and N levels, the first Singaporean play to earn this distinction.

In this, the second part of a two-part interview, Haresh talks about The Necessary Stage, his plays, and the evolution of their role in Singapore.

What can one learn from the World Cup? Head-butting is bad; passing is good; defense is even better; and, staying calm and serene when approaching the ball in penalty kicks is best. However, these lessons aren’t the ones we, or at least most of us, can easily apply to our daily lives. Is there something more that demonstrates why the Italians are so good and be applicable to the rest of us?

The answer appears to be culture. According to an article in the U.K.’s The Telegraph, the Italians’ devotion to good food, slower lifestyle, and more time for leisure all add up to a better way of living and doing better in life.

In comparison to the Telegraph’s home based audience, Italian men and women stay healthier longer — ten years for men and fourteen years for the women. The Italian government spends significantly more money on the quality of school lunches. Food is also the top expenditure in an Italian household.

Meals are an occasion. As opposed to many of us that eat, literally, on the run or in a few bites at our desks, Italians are more likely to go home for lunch and then take a nap. Already, don’t you get the sense you, too, would improve your ball passes with this approach to daily life? Food is not the only sacred element.

The average work week in the UK is 43.6 hours. In Italy it is 38.5. Don’t you think you, too, would play better defense with this approach to the work week?

For one of the Telegraph’s stats I have no idea how they found it, but it’s in the Telegraph so let’s believe it: More than 25% of the journeys in Italy are made by walking, as opposed to only 12% in England. You see the connection. A leisurely stroll, an even pace, an unhurried approach. Now, don’t you think your PKs would improve?

Anyone who enjoys making an occasion of a meal, putting their working life in perspective, and taking a stroll to see and hear the world around us is someone who is going to be in a festival audience time and time again. In other words, success can come from simply enjoying life and each other.

- Bill Reichblum

Haresh Sharma is the Resident Playwright of The Necessary Stage, and Co-Artistic Director of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. He has written more than 50 plays which have been staged in Singapore, Glasgow, Birmingham, London, Dublin, Cairo, Melbourne, Busan, Seoul and New Delhi. He has been awarded fellowships and grants by the British Council, the United States Information Service and Asia-Europe Foundation, and was conferred the Young Artist Award in 1997. Among his published collections of plays, Still Building was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize and the Singapore Book Prize. His play Off Centre has recently been selected by Singapore’s Ministry of education as one of the literature texts for both O and N levels, the first Singaporean play to earn this distinction.

In this, the first part of a two-part interview, Haresh talks about the M1 Festival, its goals, and its relationship to its audience.

Cultural changes are captured in time when a word or expression moves from slang to adoption in standard dictionaries. So, what’s news in our culture? Google is now a verb.

To google and googling have been added to this year’s new words for Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. The standard use will be to use the words in lower case, although the upper case is provided in the dictionary’s etymology of the word.

Google, the company, is concerned about the dimming of its own brand name as the word “google” becomes ubiquitous for online searching no matter which search engine one uses. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added Google as a verb in its new list on June 15, but kept the word in the uppercase. (Google wants to avoid those who drink a coke while xeroxing their kleenex.)

I wonder how this will play out in other languages. It was not that long ago that the French government rushed to defend world literature from Google’s plan to digitize books because of the implied bias for books in English. (Word to look out for in 2007, from the French press: “omnigooglization.”)

Will “google” be rejected as another American-generated expression for use around the world? Or, will “google” be accepted in our new reality of an online world: a world of direct communication, and one without borders?

If you are struggling with whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, look at history. In Merriam-Webster’s first edition (1806) of words to move from American slang to dictionary acceptance, the list included: debit, presidential, and publicity.

In Ancient Greek philosophy, something did not exist until it was named. Just imagine what our world would be like if we did not have these three signifiers.

On the other hand, that same edition also added a word we celebrate: surf!

Maybe history will show that “google” is not the most significant new entry this year. The other new words and phrases for 2006 include:

• aquascape
• big-box
• drama queen
• labelmate
• manga
• mouse potato
• polyamory
• qigong
• ringtone
• sandwich generation
• soul patch
• spyware
• supersize
• unibrow

A KadmusArts prize goes to the best entry using all of these new words and phrases in one paragraph about the arts festival life.

- Bill Reichblum

Sekou Sundiata is a poet and performance artist who has created several acclaimed theater works. His most recent recording, Long Story Short, was released by Righteous Babe Records. His performance works include: The Circle Unbroken is a Hard Bop, which toured throughout the U.S. and received three AUDELCO Awards and a BESSIE Award; The Mystery of Love, commissioned and produced by New Voices/New Visions at Aaron Davis Hall in New York and the American Music Festival in Philadelphia; and Udu, a music theatre work produced at 651 ARTS, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and the Walker Art Center amongst other venues. Most recently, he was part of the Vision Festival in New York, and this coming weekend he will perform The 51st Dream State at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In November he’ll be performing at the BAM Next Wave Festival.

In this interview, Sekou talks about his process for creating his multi-faceted works.

Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail is one of those books that is going to change the way you think about the internet — and, I believe, the performing arts.

Coming out this month (published by Hyperion), Anderson builds on his October 2004 article in Wired Magazine, where he is editor-in-chief. The book details how the culture of the internet has changed our thinking and purchasing trends from mass markets to niche markets. As he writes on his blog:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare…In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don’t individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

Put another way, if the twentieth century was the century of hits, the twenty-first century is going to be the century of niches. Think Amazon, Rhapsody, and KadmusArts. KadmusArts?

The perfect long tail business is KadmusArts:

• context of content rules;
• based in a multi-faceted, multi-national but clearly defined community;
• user-created content;
• specialized information;
• targeted advertising;
• digital goods available;
• and (soon) physical goods.

(All right — before you respond with outrage at our hubris or legitimately point out we are not quite there yet, let us have our little moment to see “Amazon, Rhapsody and KadmusArts” listed together as the successful tripod of companies bringing culture to the world!)

The main point is understanding the applicability of the Long Tail for the future flourishing of performing arts festivals. In a new world where niches emerge as the big new market, we become less susceptible to the dominance of mainstream hits in the arts.

Here is Anderson’s list of the dangers of “hitism” which has held us captive:

• Everyone wants to be a star;
• Everyone is in it for the money;
• If it isn’t a hit, it’s a miss;
• The only success is mass success;
• “Direct to video” = bad;
• “Self-published” = bad;
• “Independent” = “they couldn’t get a deal”;
• Amateur = amateurish;
• Low-selling = low quality;
• If it were good, it would be popular.

Do you see the possibilities? Performing arts festivals have been proving the dangers of this list for years — and our audiences know it.

Through combining easily accessible information-context-goods found via the web, the performing arts’ platform for understanding-integration-purchasing completely changes.

So let’s celebrate Chris Anderson and get ready to surf the Long Tail for many years to come. (In other words, go buy the book and see how it applies to you.)

By the way, if you invite him for a speech, his share of the proceeds goes to Creative Commons - the nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works.

Every time I flip a coin from now on, I’m calling tails.

- Bill Reichblum