Arts Professional Story: Mark Hackman

Mark Hackman, photo by Emily Coughlin

Over the last few years, Chicago’s concert dance venues have nurtured a particularly wide range of tastes. As you read this, your favorite dance company’s community board is probably advertising a big ol’ menu of flavors. You’ve got your ballet/modern/tap standards, your ethnic styles, your urban styles, and the newest, most cutting edge “contemporary” style that’s been combining itself with everything from hip hop to hula.

Good or bad, with all these promotional tactics to employ, we still don’t seem to be any closer to establishing concert movement as something the average food service employee would want to consider on the weekend. This is one of the greatest challenges that preoccupies all involved, but especially the producer.

While there aren’t a lot of full-time dance producers in the city right now, whether a big-time money maker or just a small-time penny pincher like myself, we all pretty much have the same set of responsibilities: to insure the financial viability of the piece/concert/season/company. This can be done through careful budgeting of expenses. It can be done through securing outside sponsors. Sometimes, God forbid, it can even be by gauging and influencing the earning potential of the work itself.

While marketing, budgeting and all that work together to meet the bottom line, for the sake of this article, we’ll just tackle the actual work itself. And while it is nowhere near an artist’s job to help me get you paid, a little teamwork never hurt anybody. So how can you know if your dance piece is producer-friendly? In another way, how can you decipher your piece’s earning potential? In more elitist terms, how can you know if you’re still an artist or just one big sellout? Since I work in numbers, I’ve broken it down into a math formula. I’ll let you decide for yourself how serious I am as to whether it can really be this simple.

The “Mephisario Formula” (aka demon producer) for concert dance works:



Your dance piece’s final score is the total of 4 numbers each pertaining to different parts in the creative process.

FORMULA BREAKDOWN:

FOUNDATION SCORE = 
Every big idea starts somewhere. While this seems to be the most varied of all the work’s aspects, there’s two real big starting points we can stick a number on: Music and Purpose.

Music – Start this formula with the # of Google hits your piece’s song currently has divided by 100,000: Type into Google the name of the artist first and then the name of the song with no comma in between or quotation marks. If you have more than one song in your piece then take the average.

Song choice is a huge part of the work’s success and us producers love a beat the kids all know. I’m not saying your piece will fail if Lil’ Wayne isn’t doing your soundtrack. I’m just saying that people are more likely to buy and love, if that is the case.

Purpose – divide your Music Score by the # of motives you have for actually creating the piece in the first place. As you can guess, you’ll score higher the fewer reasons you have. Producers and critics love focus in works, so if the whole reason you’re choreographing this thing is to save the whales, fantastic. But if it’s to save the whales AND pay homage to Radiohead AND comment on women in the workplace then we have a problem. Your buyers already spent enough brainpower trying to figure out how their $20 ticket exploded to $24.50 with processing fees, so do keep it simple.

TOOLS SCORE =
A conductor has musicians. A director has actors. Guess what you’ve got…

Diversity- Take the # of races dancing in your piece and add that to the number of genders. For example, a quartet w/ 2 white guys, 1 black guy and 1 white woman would score 4 (2 races + 2 genders). Aside from a diverse cast simply being more fun to look at, us producers generally have to be cowards in order to do our job. So while you should go ahead and be brave, convicted, etc… I just want to be sure I’m offending as few a people as possible and displaying a wide array of colors and cultures onstage can help ensure that.

Fitness – Divide your diversity score by the average body fat percentage of your dancers. Example, if the average body mass for the cast is 16%, divide the above quartet’s Diversity Score (4) by .16 which = 25. Oh my goodness!!! I did not just publicly mention physical fitness relating in any way to dance performance! So sorry you guys, as a dancer I’ve gotten the ‘fat talk’ before and I know it sucks to give it as much as it does to get it. But audiences are paying an awful lot see human beings physically captivate them and being ripped is just another way to do it.

Keep in mind I’m only talking about body MASS, not body TYPE. For what it's worth, some of my favorite dancers are strong, broad, short, tall, skinny, etc… and Chicago does a great job of having forms that utilize different physical types. I’m sure most of you don’t know the average body mass of your dancers so feel free to email dancerbodymass@ffc.com mention my name and Fitness Formula Clubs can arrange to get your numbers quick and free.

PROCESS SCORE =
This one is a little complicated. Now that you’ve got your inspiration and your tools, it’s time to test how you actually execute the making of this masterpiece/gold mine.

Take the # of total ‘tricks’ in your work and divide it by the # of minutes in length of your finished product. Multiply tricks per minute by the percent number you edited off your piece AFTER you finished setting it + the number of total tricks.
Example: So if you set a 4:24 piece and edit it down to 4:00 that’s 10% edited so use the number 10. With 5 tricks that looks like 5/4 (10 + 4) = 17.5

Physical Impressiveness – Writers have alliteration and all that stuff, singers have the high notes and musicians have guitar solos. In the end, they’re all demonstrating the most tangibly difficult aspects of their training. Dance is probably the most direct art form in terms of its capacity for this type of demonstration of what training can lead to. Whether it’s a variation on a split, turn, flip, balance or handstand… for the sake of this conversation we’ll just call them ‘tricks’. The masses love them, so the producers love them too, so the more the better. For the technicalities of scoring, let’s count any pirouettes or turns more than a triple as a ‘trick’. Multiple people doing the same trick in unison or cannon just counts as one. And the same person doing the same trick more than once still only counts as one.

Editing – Surprisingly, this has been the one category that most often sees choreographers scoring zero and I have no idea why. You’ve no idea how often I see brilliant dancemakers look at the CD player trying to figure out how many counts they have left to fill. After all these years of creative development, why in the world are we still just filling counts? Edit the song, trash movement, pull dancers, whatever. 'Shorter the better' is the basic rule of thumb to keep your producer from sweating bullets.

PRODUCT SCORE =
Here we go. In a producer's eyes as well as the audience, nothing matters but the final product.

Appropriateness – Take the age range that your piece is appropriate for. If it’s for all ages then score yourself a ‘75’ as that’s the range we’ll use. Inappropriate for under 18 and score yourself 58, etc… Again, part of a producer’s job is to be a coward so we can cast a wide net.

POSPOV – Last but in no way least, complete your Product Score by adding your age appropriateness to your POSPOV score. When dealing with the long, arduous ups and downs that go with the process of creating a work, I like to try to stop as often as I can and remind myself to imagine the “point of sale point of view”. This is simply the vantage point of what matters most to “art for sale”… the paying audience. So you had a fight with one of the dancers. So your boyfriend dumped you right before tech week. The POSPOV score is the numerical amount a paying customer cares about what you went through to create what they’re watching. This amount will always be zero. They don’t know what journey you went on in actualizing your piece and, quite frankly, they don’t have to know.

And here we are. Add the totals of your 4 scores (Foundation, Tools, Process, Product) and you’ve got the number that, by my formula at least, dictates whether or not your piece is producer-friendly.

By way of my biased, still-proving-to-be-expert formula, if your piece scores higher than 130 points then, in my eyes at least, you're one big sellout. Congratulations. And like any attempt to guess the quality of art there are exceptions to every best laid plan. My most favorite dance piece in the history of mankind only scored a 103. The most recent piece I personally choreographed scored a 121. And if you do a G-rated work to the Beatles “Let it Be” you’ve automatically scored at least 200.

But however you play, I’ll still leave it up to you to decide how seriously I'm actually taking this formula. I will say that I take dance very seriously and especially in terms of sharing my love for it with others. Chicago is such an exciting place right now in that it’s yet to be typecast by the rest of the dance world but has more than enough resources to make a huge noise in whatever way we want. I personally believe dance (at least in America) could stand to ‘sell out’ for a few years to get our audience back. And as simple and naïve as this formula seems… an inoffensive, concise, physical work done to a hit song by a ripped, diverse cast sounds really good on paper.

I’ll be standing behind this formula through thick and thin. If you’d like to think like a producer for a second and make some money then take on this challenge for me. If your work scores higher than 130, show me the math and I will very gladly come see your show by purchasing a full-priced ticket. Ask questions about the above and I will elaborate. Be insulted and I will beg your forgiveness. Just go to selloutwithme@chicagodancecrash.com. Plainly put, as a producer I want to put butts in the seats. I want to make money off of your talent, a bunch of it, and I’ll do anything short of making you ashamed of yourself to do so. Hopefully your art has someone(s) behind it willing to say the same thing, but regardless, please do keep in mind that you have to have an audience first before you can speak to them.


Mark Hackman realized his love for dance about the same time his instructors lead him to believe he'd never make it as a professional performer. They were completely right. Mark is an ugly, talentless dancer. Partly to still serve the craft and partly to satisfy his own need for self-relevance, Mark got into producing not long into college while earning a bacheolor's degree in both Dance and Theatre Management at Illinois State University. To date, Mark has produced over 25 full-length shows/festivals and co-produced many others across the country ranging from widely successful to not successful in the least. Currently, Mark is one of several Midwest talent scounts for dance for Redbull Energy, is the Dance Programming Coordinator at the Lakeshore Theatre, and serves on several advisory committees and boards in the Chicagoland area. Mark happily spends most of his time as producing director for Chicago Dance Crash, a contemporary company entering their 7th season and, last year, was featured in the Chicago Tribune's business section as a positive example of financial management and growth within the performance art industry. When Mark isn't watching everyone else have fun at Dance Crash, his remaining hours are spent serving on the Artistic Advisory Committee for the Dance Chicago Festival, watching Cartoon Network, and preparing himself as the new producer for the annual "Duets for My Valentine" concert series in 2010.

Mark's current endeavors include the next installment in the 3-year run of the "Keeper of The Floor" competition series at the Lakeshore Theatre on September 25th and an audience-dictated concert series, "The Drawing Board", held at the Ruth Page Theatre September 18th - 26th.