collaboration in January. The five or six
groups involved will produce a two-week
chamber music festival Jan. 19 through
Feb. 1 called “Chamber Blast.”
The idea grew out of a meeting between
Bilotta and Ellen Bergstone Wasil, who
is the new Executive Director of Portland
Piano International. Bilotta’s Chamber
Music Northwest had compressed its concerts outside its Summer Festival extravaganza into a Winter Festival last January,
only to find itself competing with lots of
other groups for attention, which is what
got him envisioning sharing a metaphorical sandbox with other classical music
groups. He proposed to Wasil that they
do some co-promotion work, and they
started inviting other groups with January chamber music events to the party, including Friends of Chamber Music, Third
Angle New Music Ensemble and Portland
Youth Philharmonic.
2 01 4 -15
SEASON
“SOME OF THE
BEST DANCERS
YOU’LL EVER SEE”
- CALGARY HERALD
LOUDER
“Silos are just not feasible,” Wasil said,
changing the metaphor a bit. “Our board
saw this collaboration as a good thing.
They sit on other boards, see what minimal resources we all have, and believe
that we can’t be seen NOT working
together.”
The groups wrote a grant to get some
marketing help for the festival, and by the
time you’re reading this, you may be able
to find a dedicated website with a calendar and information about the concerts.
You may have been approached via a joint
email communication campaign, and you
may have seen posters and print and online advertising. Or maybe they didn’t get
the grant, and they’re resorting to more
guerilla media infiltrations ... in which
case, you’ll have to meet them halfway.
In a culture full of the noise of mass
media and the Internet, it’s absolutely
critical for arts groups to find a way to
amplify and repeat their message. They
also have to be creative about the way
they do it, because they don’t have the
billions of dollars that major corporations have available to buy space in our
brains. Combining resources is one key,
and this ad hoc collaboration may be the
beginning of deeper collaborations in
the future.
And that’s where we come in, because
collectively, through social media and
face-to-face encounters, we have the ability to amplify the key message here: that
our culture-shed is generating satisfying,
important, creative experiences for itself.
And the more we work together to get
that message out, the happier we’ll be. .
THAN WORDS
MAR 19 - 21 / 2015 / 7:30PM
NEWMARK THEATRE
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WORLD PREMIERE / IHSAN RUSTEM
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ARTSLANDIA AT THE PERFORMANCE JANUARY | FEBRUARY
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