Dream Merchant, Part 2

Interior Design: Benoy, Tech Design: Phil Soden

In the previous installment, I detailed some of the technical issues involved in constructing and starting up Indonesia's first, for-profit arts and entertainment center.  I detailed some of the major issues involved with folks who have no cultural or technical background in Western theater arts trying to build and operate an international venue.

As noted, there is a large cultural gap between Indonesia and the Western theatrical tradition.  At the moment, there are only two venues here that operate like a Western-style venue, one built in the Soeharto days with 500 seats and the Ciputra Artpreneur with 1,200 seats.  There are three in the planning phases, as well, that are significantly larger with rumors that one of them will be dubbed the National Theater of Indonesia (near Bandung), though it will primarily be a concert hall by design.

What this means is that there are very few people with the experience to operate this kind of venue, and there are no such things as Stagecraft classes and industry-specific lighting, sound and electrical training.  This presents a major problem by itself when it comes to staffing, operating and maintaining a venue such as the Artpreneur.

Even more profound is the lack of a "theater culture."  In the West, concepts such as "seasons," "corporate grants," "sustaining memberships," and government agencies that support such things have been around for centuries.

In Western culture, the "social season" begins with the onset of Autumn and has been well established since at least Victorian times.  It is ingrained in such things as theater seasons, teevee seasons, summer blockbusters and winter dramas.  Many Westerners may not even be aware of it, though their lives are frequently dictated by it.  That's how ingrained it is.  From Labor Day to May Day, certain colored clothing is faux pas, certain activities get shelved while others begin, even menus start to shift.  This is driven in part by changing seasons.

In Indonesia, there are only Wet and Dry seasons.  There is no winter and the culture here has never incorporated habits such as storing food and fuel, having different wardrobes that are temperature based, and so forth.  Thus, things such as teevee seasons are imported concepts here.

Western style theater is based on more than 2,000 years of development, beginning with religious adaptations of the lives of the gods to West End and Broadway, spanning a dozen countries that all added their own tastes and conventions to what we now know of as theater arts.

In Indonesia, performance began in a similar way, with ritualized presentations of religious themes, but developed in entirely different directions.  Shadow puppets, slapstick, adopted Chinese and Japanese theatrical forms and the like merged into a much less technical and simpler entertainment industry.  In recent years, the massive Broadway musicals have gotten worldwide attention because of their spectacle, and Indonesia is part of that, but it is a foreign style that is being laid over an existing framework and in many ways, they are incompatible.

Another major difference with the West is that there are no government agencies that promote the arts or offer annual grants to venues to offset the cost of production.  In Indonesia, venues and production companies sink or swim based on their ability to sell tickets, generate ancillary income and secure corporate sponsors.  The idea of private philanthropy, at least as far as the performing arts go, is unheard of, so donations are non-existent.

Into this environment I stepped, suggesting things like selling naming rights for various things within the Artpreneur, such as "Buy A Seat," or custom floor tiles with family names on them.  I also tried to suggest getting corporations to sponsor the venue rather than particular events, asking agencies such as the Jakarta Tourist Bureau to promote the center.

I was told that supporters and donors were akin to asking for charity, and rich families (such as the owner) don't do that.  I was told that corporations don't understand sponsoring venues, because no one had ever done it and so they didn't have a model for how that worked.  Also, the owner didn't want anyone else's name on the venue.  I was also told that government agencies expect to be paid for their support and didn't do such things as part of their missions.

So, I proceeded to develop a cafe and theater bar for the venue as a means of income.  I spent eight months concepting, designing layouts and crowd flow, gathering corporate partners,  I had reached the point of baning out contracts with the owner's approval all through the process.  When I projected that the bar alone would pay all the negative costs of the venue operations, even after the partners got their cuts, the owner decided that it should all be run by the family, which had (again) no experience in such things.

In addition, I could not convince anyone to sponsor or pay for a full season of shows.  Why was this important?  Well, on one hand you have one show, and the other hand you have 12.  When you go to promote these shows, one the one hand you are paying about $100,000 to promote one show, and if it fails, you are stuck with a rather large bill (the average Broadway musical costs about $300,000/week plus venue costs).  On the other hand, you pay about $100,000 to promote 12 shows, and if one fails, a hit with one of the others makes up the deficit.  Obviously, amortizing costs over a full season and hedging your bets with a variety of offerings makes much more sense.

Furthermore, as with multiplex cinemas, the venue rarely makes its money from ticket sales.  When you are lucky, the tickets sales pay the negative costs of getting the show.  The profit comes from ancillary income, such as snack bars and other such things.

At this point, it was apparent to me that I was in no way going to be able to use the tool set that I have in the way that I know how to use them.  The technical side of the operation was severely compromised, but I could make it work.  However, without the tools I needed to make the center profitable, I was hamstrung.

It is possible to make theater and art venues profitable without tax money and donations.  It is done by combining business models from several different industries into a coherent revenue stream.  Take away any of those tools and it becomes increasingly difficult to earn the income necessary to maintain and operate such a complicated enterprise.

There are seven major systems in an arts and entertainment venue like the Artpreneur.  If any one of them fails, shows come to a dead halt and/or people die.  Not only do they need to be installed and operated correctly, they need constant scheduled maintenance to spot problems before they threaten the smooth functioning of the venue.

At the owner's insistence, budgets were cut in the wrong places, thus compromising the technical operations.  The owner further prevented or hampered the ability to generate revenue streams that would support the center and make profitability possible.  In this case, I decided that my presence was no longer necessary.  After all, I was hired because I knew how to build, operate and generate profit from such an operation.  Since two of the three functions were handicapped by my employer, there was no need for my expertise.

Sure, I could have stayed and drawn a paycheck with the lofty title of Executive Director, but I have too much integrity for such meaningless existence.  In addition, I could not in good conscience operate a venue that I knew was compromised and could possibly endanger life and limb if it wasn't handled in a very precise way with hours of advanced training and certification for the technicians.  I was not willing to risk my reputation for safety, even for a cushy paycheck.

I do have one legacy that will likely never be matched.  So far, Beauty and the Beast is the only show to have earned a profit at the venue.  That was the only one that I negociated and promoted.  Obviously, it's not as simple as, "Hey, kids!  I have a barn, let's do a show!"  The modern Western theater is highly complex with audiences demanding more and more dazzling special effects.  This requires absolute perfection in operating a venue to ensure the safety of the technicians, actors and audiences.

Oh, and I'm happy to report that no one suffered a lost-time injury during construction and start-up under my leadership.  'Tis better to have integrity than a cushy paycheck, I think.

Gonna Go 'Round In Circles

Cue Billy Preston.

In our last exciting episode, we talked about the silly little game that the Western oligarchs are playing that is dragging the whole world down the toilet.  In summary, we discovered that because they don't want to stop being king of the hill, even for just a moment, they are flapping their arms deperately trying to keep from riding the inevitable economic cycles.

In other words, we can sum up all the Bilerburgers, Masons, Club of Romes, Trilateral Commissions, ad nauseum, in one simple concept...Wile E. Coyote.

Wile E., in his relentless pursuit of the Roadrunner (wealth) has yet again run off a cliff and is momentarily suspended in mid-air flapping and panicking as he tries desperately to defy gravity.  It's really all that simple.  Doesn't make the pain any less here at the Real Life level, but it helps to put things in perspective a bit.

To visualize the situation, let's call on a guy names Evel Knievel.  Younger or foreign folks may not rememver this guy, but us old codgers certainly do.  People politely called him a daredevil or motorcycle stuntman.  I think of him as just crazy, as he devised ever more spectacular ways to splatter his guts all over the place on national TeeVee back in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Evel's whole gig was to run his motorcycle as fast as he could at a ramp and try to suspend himself as long and far as he could, hoping to land on the opposite ramp in a controlled sort of way.  In short, he became a hero of spectacular failure.  He holds the world record for most number of bones broken in a lifetime...433.  The human body only has 200 and some total bones.

Economic cycles, like pretty much all other cycles, are not circles, though they can appear to be from certain perspectives.  But if you get off to the side and look at them in 2-D, they look like waves.  There's an ascending part, a crest, a descending part, and a trough.  Pretty much the entire Universe works like this at one level or another.

What Evel Knievel did was to try to launch himself from one crest, bypass the intervening trough, and land on the next crest and survive the experience.  He failed more than he succeeded, but it was always fun to watch.  Kinda like tuning in NASCAR to watch the amazing wrecks rather than the endless loops at high speed.

Anyway, the Masters of War (thanks Bob) are little more than a bunch of Evel Knievels who have decided that they are far too rich and far too powerful to have to go through economic cycles.  So they've decided they're going to use all the magic incantations, illusions, rituals, and just sheer military force to brute their way from one economic crest to the next without having to first make a run through the trough.

Fine idea, but the reality is a bit more mundane because gravity simply sucks.  No two ways about it.

Though business cycles are infinitely complex, they can be visualized quite simply.  Think of two mating snakes entwined with each other, or another way would be the DNA double helix.  One side of the equation amasses debt, while the other side amasses wealth.  At some point, the equilibrium is disturbed (recessions, droughts, etc.) and the two sides swap places.  Then the whole things starts over.

Now, our group of oligarchs think they have amassed so much knowledge and power and other cool stuff like that, they think they can just suspend themselves in mid-air until the next crest comes and they land gracefully, still Masters of War.

The problem is that nothing, and I do mean NOTHING in Nature works like that.  There must always be a season of growth and a season of renewal.  There's simply no other way things can or do work.  All the ramps, calculations, incantations, and pure effort of will cannot stop something that is as entrenched in the fabric of the Universe as a cycle is.

Where we are now as a planet is that we have a new tooth trying to come in, but the old baby tooth refuses to fall out.  Consequently, the new one is growing right out on top of the old one, and the old will either have to fall out, or we gotta pull it.  Nothing will stop the new one.

If we go to our Wile E. Coyote metaphor, we have just run off a cliff and are suspended momentarily by momentum, until we look down and realize there ain't nothing under us.

If we were Evel Knievel, then we are at Caesar's Palace fountain, having just launched off the end of the ramp.  As we look ahead, we notice that our rear wheel just ain't gonna clear that last little tippy-top part of the fountain and nothing we can do will stop the inevitable broken bones that are about to materialize in our future.

OK, so what does knowing the current situation do for us?  I mean, after all these visualization exercises, what can we do with this knowledge?

First off, knowing the inevitable outcome allows us to prepare for what's coming.  We know economic winter is here, though we've enjoyed a bit of Indian Summer, but it's time to stock up and stack the cord wood in readiness for the cold blast about to hit us.

Second, knowing where we are and how we got here gives us important clues as to how to get out again.  Since cycles are predictable, though not exactly the same each time.  Nevertheless, we can predict with some certainly where we will land.  When you get lost, the first thing most people will do is retrace their steps to get back to the point where they got off the trail.  Unwinding this mess is both a natural part of the cycle, and the answer to solving the huge mess these greedly little worms created.

Third, it takes the mystery out of our perception of who these weasely little idiots are running the world and shows us conclusively that they are nothing more than slimy idiots who thought they were Time Lords.  Picture the bankers at Gringott's in the Harry Potter series.

Finally, we know not to let anyone do this again.  We should etch this lesson in stone monuments as immutable as the Great Pyramid - don't let the slimy bastards try to defy gravity again, at least while we are all passengers.

We need to use this lesson to keep the greasy nards in check and never let them get hold of the stunt bikes again...ever!  Now we have the playbook, identities and locations of all these maggot brains.  Now we can lock them in Arkam Asylum and pump them full of their own pharmaceuticals and never let the bastards roam freely again.  We must turn all their glorious Track and Trace toys on them and keep them under surveillance for the rest of Time.

Perhaps a well-thought out eugenics program will keep them from breeding until their bloodlines simply die off.  An appropriate punishment for what they have done to humanity and our planet.

It's time.  Time to sit back and laugh at Wile E. as he sails ever so gracelessly to the bottom.  Time to stop hoping the Evel will make it across and prepare to be entertained by the inevitable crash and burn.

Mostly, it's time to prepare for winter.  It's going to be a rough one, since it's been delayed for so long.  A lot of people are going to be hurt, and that too is a cycle.

Most of all, we need to take a page from good project management and start keeping a planetary set of Lessons Learned.  At least that way we can stop making the same mistakes and start making a whole new set of them.

It's a bitter pill to swallow, but we are partly responsible for allowing the vile, repulsive gnomes to run the world in the first place.  And which of us hasn't been distracted by all the little flashy lights in boxes?

Suck it up, boys and girls, the first big blast of winter is coming.  But always remember, there's a back side to every storm.

And while we huddle around the fire waiting for the storm to pass, be sure and start your list of Lessons Learned so our kids don't fall for the same BS.