In the last two years I rediscovered my love of reading. I started with The Name of the Wind, then made my way through The Storm Light Archive, and now have found myself two years later wrapping up The Wheel of Time, a fourteen book fantasy epic comprised of some 12,000 pages (also, amazon is adapting it for TV and the cast is HOT.) Most people that come into my Conversation Zone™ over the last year have heard me ramble about the series. Conversations, ultimately ending in the question: what is the series about? Which, frankly, is a very difficult thing to encapsulate. Shockingly, there’s actually a reason the series is fourteen books, it could probably have been cut down to maybe 11 or 12 books. But, most of the series is important for understanding and contextualizing the entirety of the series, the characters actions, their motivations, and so on. Circling back around to the question at hand - what is the series about? The series follows the Dragon Reborn on their preordained journey, which is writ on the Age Lace and woven into the Pattern of Ages by the turning of the Wheel of Time, to Tarmon Gaidon - or the Last Battle, in which the Dragon Reborn must face off with the Dark One himself. The Dragon reborn must seal the Dark One away or else he will have his way and see the complete annihilation of the Pattern, and with it all of existence.
Which is basically nonsense.
The story itself is the journey, which you can’t really capture in a logline, even a very long one comprised of mostly Seuss-ian gibberish. The point I’m getting to here is the journey. The Crowd has come a long way in the last year and it’s time to start to digest some of that journey. We’ve had successes and we’ve made mistakes, but each of these is an invaluable part of the journey leading us to where we are today. A necessity one might say. The short of it - the logline, if you will - is this: we’re ending the House Team Program.
Let’s look at the journey and reasons for why we’re doing this, and then of course, examine the destination. In board and manager meetings we’ve talked at length about the program, the pros and cons. We’ve compared it what what we initially set out to do with it, and what it has seemed to have done. I am ever the optimist and politically identify as a Utopian Futurist, but sometimes my idealism and optimism blind me to the proof in the pudding of so many other similar programs. Our intentions with creating the House Team Program were the following:
Challenge the conventions of other House Team Programs
Create space for concepts outside of standard improv teams.
Pay our coaches so performers don’t have to.
Give artists more license and ownership over the space.
Provide a space for more tenured folks to fit into the fabric of the Crowd.
We’ll put a pin in those for now, but I wanted to remind myself, and you too, Dearest Reader, of why we created this program to begin with. Now I want to look at why we aren’t going to be continuing the program:
We don’t have the resources to properly administer the program.
We had to stop funding our coaches.
The administrative toll was far higher than anticipated.
We don’t feel it’s in line with the Crowd’s brand.
I’ll dissect each of these points further down below.
Resource Management
We’ve encountered a few stumbling blocks over the last year, the first of which, and most importantly - licensing. We had been working with a number of great, far too generous, and thoughtful professionals, architects and lawyers to finalize our Performing Arts Venue license. After three years of rigmarole, paperwork and trips to city hall, the gavel has panged and the jury is out. Our beloved 3935 N. Broadway location will not be able to be licensed without considerable renovations, including a rework of the HVAC, construction of a foyer at the top of the stairs as well as installation of a door, construction of an additional bathroom, and those were just the first three items listed before I stopped reading because we were already priced out. All this to say, if we’d like to stick to our original ambitions of creating something permanent and lasting, a space that can be self sufficient, it won’t be where we are now. We don’t necessary have to move, but we can’t stay here.
Why do I tell you this, when we haven’t even figured it out what we’re going to do? Especially considering I was advised not to talk about the move until we finalize a location.
Context. Journey.
This move is presenting with tremendous work load, but an equally tremendous opportunity. This move could be what sets the Crowd up for long term prosperity and self sustainability. Basically, it’s a big question mark. We’ve got a number of irons in the fire, are hoping to be able to begin making some announcements in 2020, but for now know that we’re working on it.
Further, as outlined in our previous financial disclosure (read more here), our finances weren’t as resilient as we believed them to be. We can’t afford the budget we set out to alot for the program, which has caused us to tighten our belts in other areas, and was the first red flag that something was amiss. We were optimistic about our first foyer into grant writing this year, and taking full advantage of 501(c)3, but have had mixed luck. We have no problem saying it, we are a 3/10 business, and a 11/10 comedy venture. We’re trying to find some marriage between the two, creating a more professional realized business. We’re aware of our shortcomings and are working to shore them up. We even went and got a business mentor, his name is Asher and he’s hella balls-to-the-wall awesome.
Finally, the program introduced a whole slew of issues we hadn’t planned on. I typically like to estimate how much work will be, and then double it. In experience, this has been a safe estimate. This time, my intuition failed me and I have done some re-calibrations since. The issues, without going into too much detail, stem from ownership. The Crowd has responsibility to each of these teams to serve as a facilitator, mediator, and director for these teams. I had hoped things would be easy, but they weren’t. We’ve had more human resources issues in the single year of administering our house team program as we did the previous three years combined. We hadn’t accounted for the strain that would put on our staff (read: myself). It was a tremendous drain that was kept us pursuing other programs in earnest.
Brand Identity
While, our lack of resources is the biggest reason for our decision, we had a discussion about brand identity. Early on, when I was working on the launch of the program a friend of mine asked something to affect of, “But why? It doesn’t really seem to fit with what ya’ll do.”
My gut reaction: They were wrong, I was right. There words made me recoil. I’m not too proud to admit that I had some imaginary mental arguments with them - but at the end of the day, there was a lot of truth in what they said. It’s a little incongruous with the rest of what we do.
As many people know, I have no love for auditions, and they have no love for me. I have never been on a harold team. In a decade of auditioning I can count on one finger the number of times I have been cast. The process is never fun. It encourages systematic propriety (hierarchy). And propriety is something I have a great disdain for. We set out to create a space for all the weird-o’s, non-conformist, marginalized, and other wise left behind people. We set out to create a space for anyone with sincere interest, fine character, and genuine enthusiasm regardless of any other quality about them. The audition process is punishing and can easily turn people away; people will rebuttal with ‘rejection being part of the business,’ and i’f you can’t tolerate rejection, you aren’t going to make it.’
I guess, I’m left wondering - does it have to be? We have a proposition, which we’ll get to at our destination. But we have a little bit more Journey to go.
Ultimately, it comes back to this essential question: How do we do the most good with what we have? What is the best recipe with the very finite quantity of time, money, and motivation we have? How can we best serve our community and mission? And, unfortunately, that perfect recipe doesn’t include a House Team Program administered by us at this point in our journey.
Where are we going? How can we still stay true to those noble intentions that we set out, while staying with-in both our means and identity? How do we invest in those that invest in us?
Here’s our solution. We’d like to introduce The Residency.
Beginning in November, the Crowd will be offering Residency to indie teams, to play in our Resident Night on Fridays at 10PM. The Residency Program will be overseen by our new SHADOW TRIBUNAL which is comprised of a representative from each of our current Resident Teams - Carlos Cerutti from Cozy, Brandi Harris from Black Cat, Tyler Malec from Teenage Nicholas, Chris Hanley from Lo-Fi Beats (To Relax and Study To), and Meghan McGuire from FiasCO!
Submissions are open and available on our website.
The first official Resident Night will be Friday, November 1st at 10PM at the Crowd Theater.
Salud my dudes,
Dillon
post script
This is a decision I have fretted over for months. We launched this program as an experiment;I launched this program to dabble in curation. We had noble intentions, but were not able to meet our goals. I was not able to deliver what I promised to the letter, and for that I am sorry. I am not a welcher, and would hate to be thought of as one, but this program ran too personal a toll. I have unfortunately not found it in me to separate my own personal ego from the enterprise. Every departure from a team affects me personally, and I can’t help but think of it as a reflection of myself. This decision was made with the best intentions, and I will inevitably spend the next few weeks of distressed that I’ve upset a lot of my good friends. While the fault may not be entirely ours, the responsibility is. I am sure this will be met by a great variance of responses from outrage to understanding, but I implore you Dearest Reader, to read this with the latter - and know that we believe this the best decision for the everyone involved.
Continued reading:
Original House Team Announcement and Digest
