I want to respond to Mike Metlay’s “resignation letter”, not because I disagree with anything he says in it, but because 1) I feel his pain, believe me I do, and 2) a lot of what we’re trying to do with NEEMFest is an attempt to respond to some of the atmospheric conditions he describes in his letter.  Most of those atmospheric conditions are described in his third paragraph.

Mike’s “logistical issues” and “sub-optimal management” critiques are joined at the hip.  The fact is, pulling off something like Mountain Skies, or NEEMFest, or any other kind of multi-performance event requires a great deal of pre-planning and preparation.   You can’t avoid that if you want to have a high-quality event.  Like a lot of collaborations, this involves a degree of autocracy. I was trained in live theater, which is perhaps the most collaborative art form there is, but theatrical collaborations get a lot of their strength from the fact there’s ultimately a “decider”- the director – who is responsible for the artistic product and has final say in what’s going to happen. It is not a structure in which absolute democracy works well, because absolute democracy is inefficient by design, and there’s just not time enough in the day to belabor every little decision that has to be made along the way.   

The timeline for the preparation of a quality event stretches out over months, especially if the event involves applying for grants or requires any kind of marketing or promotion.   Right now, I’m working on a grant for NEEMFest whose deadline is this Friday (December 16, 2022).  NEEMFest does not take place until September 8, 2023.  That’s a lot of lead time.  Most events calendars in print publications want to see submissions a minimum of a month in advance and it can be as much as two or three months — timelines for event promotions are long, and so are those for attracting corporate sponsorship. Most corporate sponsors exhaust their budgets quite early, by design — they don’t want to deal with supplicants year-round, and in any case those relationships can take years to establish.

All that to say that a core group of people need to take responsibility for such an event well in advance of its occurrence. 

As to Mike’s mention of “significant expenses counterbalanced by effectively zero revenue”, that’s the way it is, and that’s the way it’s always going to be if we depend on ticket sales for revenue.  I have no idea what the earned-income figures are for resident theater companies now; back in the day, it was only about 65% and I suspect it’s gone down.  If we don’t want to charge artist fees, then we need to find resources elsewhere, either through grants, corporate sponsorships, or private philanthropy.  And I agree that artist fees are a curse – they are a strong filter on participation, particularly for those who are not particularly well-off, and who are faced with considerable travel expenses if they want to attend.   Going back to ticket sales…. If an online livestreamed performance that is essentially free draws a maximum of 30 people, how realistic is it to expect that we’re going to sell $7000 worth of tickets to a three-day festival? 

Note, too, that grant- and sponsorship-seeking extends the timeline for preparation significantly.

I think that we need to interpret the entirety of what Mike has said in a slightly different way.  For two years now, I’ve been asking one very simple question about NEEMFest:  in an era where livestreaming is both inexpensive and common, why would you want to gather a bunch of people in one place if all they’re going to do is a series of performances that people would prefer to watch from their living rooms?   

There are a number of good reasons why you would do that, but perhaps the greatest of those is simply that there is a lot that we can learn from each other.  That leads me to the idea that our gatherings should be a lot more like conferences, and a lot less like a concert series.

The price of that transformation is commitment – to the process of learning from each other, to becoming better musicians, and from figuring out how to make these events better and better.  There’s certainly no place in that world for no-shows, and not much of one for the day-trippers who pirouette in long enough to do a 25-minute set and disappear immediately afterward.  As we discovered at last year’s NEEMFest, it also requires commitment on the part of volunteers; we can’t afford staff to run audio and visuals, to staff a box office or a front desk, or to do any of the other activities that surround a successful event.  We need more performers to help out in other ways. 

Mike is to be congratulated, both for his service to the community and for his ability to avoid the sort of ranting that I’ve done here ;).  I will welcome your comments and responses.