Art vs Craft & Evolution vs Response – the World Changed (again) – now what?

A note from rob this week:

So – the world has changed dramatically at least TWICE since 2020 began rendering much of my last SAW “masterclass” about Making Music Your Life at least temporarily obsolete, and Coronavirus and George Floyd have left my previously planned topics for THIS “Community Day” course feeling quaint if not almost offensively out-of-touch. Though initially I’d planned to drill into specifics of image vs message and how we operate on the continuum between who we are as performers (art) vs how we sell and execute that performance (craft) – I think it may be more appropriate, and useful, to revisit many of the things I’d touched on in 2018 and see how they’ve changed in not just the last two years, but in the past two months. However you personally feel about current events, we need to talk about the realities of how these things have changed our Lives as artists and creators in a very fundamental way. None of us can see the future, but some of this has changed forever.

This will be a practical conversation about booking (from both the artist and the booker’s point of view), audiences, venues, messaging and even how we present a digital show going forward in a virtually (pun-intended) unrecognizable world. Yeah – we talked about all this stuff two years ago – but the world changed. Now what? We’ll go from broad strokes (theory, experience and a bit of philosophy) to the specific (OBS, Zoom, Facebook Producer and more).

In almost every profession there’s a balance between art and craft. A coffee vendor can hand you a cup of joe or a barista can hand you a crafted espresso beverage – and there’s a time and place for both. Code for an application can be utilitarian or it can be elegant but maybe it should be both even if no-one ever knows. As performers there’s a fine line between work, making it LOOK like work and making the work look good – and a spectrum of everything in between. All along the flow of writing a song, picking up an instrument and outputting a piece for consumption we make choices that define not just the piece we create, but US. It effects our decisions in how we talk to our audience, how much reverb to use, how we dress on stage and how we reply to an email. How much does our image, our message, our product and our SELF overlap – and how much SHOULD it? 

Presentation and Q&A with an artist who’s struggled with and found comfort in all of these questions and all the answers he’s found over the course of 20 years performing, growing and reinventing as a performer, visual artist, community leader and organizer in the arts.

This virtual class will be held on Saturday, June 20 over Zoom as part of SAW’s 2020 Community Day.