Category Archives: performing arts

2022 update on Demographic Change and the Performing Arts

This short video on demographic change is as fresh and needed today as it was a decade ago when I created it. The questions I posed for the performing arts have only become all the more urgent in this ongoing COVID pandemic reality – and in may ways they still beg to be fully answered by the live arts – as well as other sectors, like health care, housing, social services, technology.

Also, it should be obvious that the labour shortages we see now across almost every sector aren’t merely a COVID effect but largely a demographic effect. The COVID part seems more specific in that people who need to work are working but they aren’t as willing to earn low wages, and want reasonable working conditions. In fact, labour market participation is up in younger age groups as COVID recovery has advanced.

Changing Demographics and the Performing Arts from CAPACOA on Vimeo.

Here are a couple of articles on how the aging population is playing out when we don;t make the plans needed even though we can see the train leave the station decades in advance.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427a-eng.htm

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/job-skills-shortage-1.6409237

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-workers-covid-retirements-1.6529325

Rebuilding Better – Nine Trends in the Performing Arts

9 years ago, in March 2013, I wrote a call to action for the performing arts presenting sector. It was an adjunct to the seminal Value of Presenting Study that I wrote to instigate sectoral action to secure the relevance of the sector in the mid- to long-term.


These Reflections and Recommendations were:
1. Strategy and organizational design to nurture capacity for change, strengthen relevance and resilience, come into the 21st century organizationally, in terms of marketing, programming and so forth
2. Building Meaningful Statistical Frameworks – Culture Satellite Account and Mapping the sector
3. Strengthen / Role in Communities – invest in competencies and professional development as a community leader, design for community impacts, ongoing awareness raising of value and benefits of the performing arts
4. Demography and Access – Know your community and your market; Access for seniors (technology-enabled), Partnering with Indigenous peoples, Partnering with recent Immigrants (EDI)
5. Digital Technologies – embrace online and mobile distribution of live arts, create a cross-functional working group to explore digital distribution in the live arts
6. Redefining Competition (focus on non-arts industries) – Define competitive value proposition (relative to non-arts competitors)
7. Experience Design – Brand-first relationship building (not merely transactional), secondary markets (digital impact)

Most of these feel as relevant as ever to me, showing how much more progress the live arts sector needs to make to join the contemporary world with all its complicated dynamics.

In light of COVID and the early stages of – and the vagaries of – COVID recovery in 2022, I have been talking about these 9 trends requiring urgent attention in the sector if it wants to rebuild better:

1.Mental health impacts

2.Financial precarity

3.Loss of expertise and talent – COVID

4.Digital transformation of society

5.Climate change and touring

6.Need new business models re: return to gatherings

7.Ways to support local artists

8.Digital Dissemination platforms

9.Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion

In part it feels like the more things change the more they stay the same. It also feels like perhaps some of us have learned enough to really tackle the big issues.
https://lnkd.in/gJRdUyVx

Yukon Entrepreneur Podcast – Interview with Inga Petri – 2022

Thanks to host Kari Johnston who interviewed me as part of her Yukon Entrepreneurs Podcast series. Kari has been talking to Yukon business people about how they are deploying, leveraging, changing or transitioning their business models during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the case or Strategic Moves, demand skyrocketed as a result of our reputation for digital expertise and having championed digital adoption in the live arts sector in Canada over a decade. COVID simply unleashed the urgent demand to make sense of the digital world, as well as advancing on key organizational pressures, from equity, diversity and inclusion to elevating strategic planning work to a far more actionable, meaningful level.

Listen in!

DigitalArtsNation.ca launched!

Today, we’ve launched digitalartsnation.ca, the website for Making Tomorrow Better: Taking Digital Action in the Performing Arts. This initiative received significant funding from the Canada Council for the Arts’ Digital Strategy Fund in spring of 2019. The nation-wide partnership led by the Atlantic Presenters Association includes the Manitoba Arts Network, BC Touring Council, Island Mountain Arts/Northern Exposure, Yukon Arts Centre / N3 and the Yellowknife Arts & Cultural Centre.

logo Making Tomorrow Better Taking Digital  Action in the Performing Arts

Of note: most of the participants in the face-to-face workshops live on the edges of the country. therefore we tailor content to suit the realities, including slower internet connectivity,  of rural and remote communities across Canada. Because what works there, will work in urban centres, too.

This national initiative brings practical digital know-how to participants across Canada, through custom workshops, online how-to tutorials and information-sharing

These workshops are designed to help participants speak digital with confidence – that is, we will demystify and discuss the digital realm in plain English – and quickly become competent participants in arts sector conversations about leading digital tools, emerging digital innovations, and new digital business models.

Workshops are led by Inga Petri, Strategic Moves, or Tammy Lee, Culture Creates.

Watch our upcoming workshops page and see where we are headed next!

CBC Interview: Digitizing the Performing Arts

Here is my interview from today with CBC North.

The report is available here:

Digitizing the Performing Arts: An Assessment of Opportunities, Issues and Challenges.  http://capacoa.ca/en/services/research-and-development/digitizing-performing-arts  La numérisation des arts du spectacle : Évaluation des possibilités, des enjeux et des défis. http://capacoa.ca/fr/services/recherche/numerisation-spectacle