By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.
Dear Law and Disorder:
I recently received the following clause from a performing arts venue in a contract they sent:
TERMINATION FOR CONVENIENCE: Either party may terminate this Agreement at any time upon written notice to the other party. If this Agreement is terminated before the performance, the University shall have no obligation to pay Artist. If this Agreement is terminated during the performance for any reason other than the Artist’s breach of this Agreement, the University shall compensate Artist on a prorate basis.
I told them that, in my mind, this makes the contract virtually worthless. They came back with this:
TERMINATION FOR CONVENIENCE: Either party may terminate this Agreement at any time upon written notice to the other party. If this Agreement is terminated before the performance, the University shall have limited obligations to pay Artist, as defined below. If this Agreement is terminated during the performance for any reason other than the Artist’s breach of this Agreement, the University shall compensate Artist on a prorate basis. Under no circumstances will either party be liable to the other for indirect, consequential, or incidental damages, including but not limited to anticipatory profits. The University may from time to time, under such terms and conditions as it may prescribe, make partial payments and payments on account against costs incurred by the Artist in connection with the terminated portion of this contract whenever in the opinion of the University the aggregate of such payments shall be within the amount to which the Artist shall be entitled hereunder.
I feel that I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence as a Manager to sign this, but it’s a very important venue to me and I do quite a bit of business with them. But I think this is unconscionable. Am I wrong?
“Unconscionability” implies a certain level of moral indignation is generally unwarranted in a simple engagement negotiation. The venue is merely proposing terms that are in its own best interest, not demanding that you sacrifice a sack full of kittens! If acting in one’s own self-interest were unconscionable, then most artists would have an incalculable amount of karmic debt. However, you are quite correct that the terms they are proposing are unfair to your artist. I’ve seen more and more presenters and venues trying to give themselves the unilateral right to cancel. I get it. Times are tough. Tickets are hard to sell. But it’s unreasonable and unfair to expect an artist to bear the entire loss of a cancellation. The venue’s proposed compromise is basically to reimburse the artist for any out-of-pocket costs, but not to pay the artist for the lost performance or the fact that the artist may have turned away other engagements. That’s not exactly what I would call an equitable compromise.
Regardless, the point of a contract is not to provide some false sense of security or protection, but, rather, to enable the parties to identify any issues that need to be negotiated, evaluate the pros and cons of a deal, and determine whether or not to proceed. In this regard, this contract has proven to be extremely valuable in that the venue has made it quite clear that they want to have the right to cancel without consequences. You have done your due diligence in reading and evaluating the contract. Now comes the hard part. What to do? You need to determine whether or not to engage in further negotiations, to accept the venue’s terms and sign the contract, or walk away and find another engagement. Ultimately, the decision is up to your artist. Your job as the Manager is solely to evaluate and advise your artist.
All art requires risk. The performing arts business requires a certain amount of risk as well. As the Manager, its your job to help your artist evaluate reasonable risks from unreasonable risks. Obviously, I don’t know enough about your specific artist or the specific venue to render an opinion. However, I can tell you that what is completely irrelevant to the analysis is whether or not the venue is important to you and whether or not you do “quite a bit of business with them.” As a Manager, the focus of all managerial decisions must be what is best for your artist, not you. Is the venue particularly prestigious or important to the artist? Is the fee is particularly large? Does the engagement offer your artist a particularly advantageous opportunity? Then it may be worth advising the artist to take the risk. Otherwise, the artist should decline the engagement. The impact of the artist’s decision on your own relationship with the venue, past or future, is beside the point.
If your ongoing relationship with the venue is more important to you than the relationship with your artist, then you should drop the artist. I have often heard Managers say that artists come and go, but venues are forever. However, I don’t necessarily believe this. In my experience, if an artist is popular and in demand, and especially if an artistic director wants the artist, the presenter or venue won’t care if the artist is represented by Satan himself.
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For additional information and resources on this and other
legal, project management, and business issues for the performing arts, visit ggartslaw.com
To ask your own question, write to lawanddisorder@musicalamerica.com
All questions on any topic related to legal, management, and business issues will be welcome. However, please post only general questions or hypotheticals. GG Arts Law reserves the right to alter, edit or, amend questions to focus on specific issues or to avoid names, circumstances, or any information that could be used to identify or embarrass a specific individual or organization. All questions will be posted anonymously and/or posthumously.
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THE OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER:
THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE!
The purpose of this blog is to provide general advice and guidance, not legal advice. Please consult with an attorney familiar with your specific circumstances, facts, challenges, medications, psychiatric disorders, past-lives, karmic debt, and anything else that may impact your situation before drawing any conclusions, deciding upon a course of action, sending a nasty email, filing a lawsuit, or doing anything rash!
Petrenko Hosts Petrenko
Friday, April 22nd, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 22, 2016
MUNICH — Vasily Petrenko’s debut at Bavarian State Opera this weekend prompts a glance at two Russian-born, modestly profiled conductors who have built distinct careers in Western Europe while sharing a last name. The guest from Liverpool will lead Boris Godunov, last revived two years ago by company Generalmusikdirektor Kirill Petrenko.
Inviting Vasily to work in Kirill’s house was sweet, ingenuous. After all, the two Petrenkos are what trademark attorneys call “confusingly similar” marks, a factor that doesn’t vanish just because real names are involved, or because it’s the arts. Are artists products? Their work is, notwithstanding the distance from commerce.
The Petrenkos are not of course the first conductor-brands to overlap, but unlike the Kleibers or Järvis, Abbados or Jurowskis, no disparity of talent or generation neatly separates them. Then, inescapably, there is the matter of dilution: a “Toscanini” needs no specifier.
As it happens, agents have promoted the Petrenkos as if with accidental care over geography. Although both men have enjoyed positive forays Stateside, awareness of them in Europe diverges. For a full decade, Vasily has been the “Petrenko” of reference in Britain. Kirill has been “Petrenko” in Germany.
Kirill has had such minimal renown in Britain, in fact, that retired Bavarian State Opera chief Peter Jonas last summer on Slipped Disc could report the following about the Bavarian State Orchestra’s upcoming European tour: “The [orchestra’s] committee and their management offered themselves to the [BBC] Proms for 2016 … and were sent away with the exclamation, ‘Oh no … . Kirill Petrenko? We do not really know about him over here.’ … The tour will happen all over Europe but without London.” Indeed it will.
In the meantime, Calisto Bieito’s staging of Boris Godunov gets a three-night revival April 23 to 29 with a strong cast: Sergei Skorokhodov’s pretender, Ain Anger’s chronicler and Alexander Tsymbalyuk’s riveting Boris. How will Vasily grapple with the (1869) score? Opera featured prominently in his career only at the start.
Echo Klassik Award
Placing the two Petrenkos side by side here, like baseball cards, meant compiling at least some personal facts along with the musical. So, three questions went to the conductors’ handlers. How tall is he? Where does he live (part of town)? What’s his favorite sports team?
This proved awkward, however, especially on one side, and hitherto-cordial staffers turned as cool as, well, trademark attorneys. Vasily’s people cooperated with partial answers. Kirill’s, deep inside Bavarian State Opera, stonewalled: “Mr. Petrenko generally does not wish to answer any personal questions.”
As it turned out, Vasily was on record with full answers over the years to all three questions for various media outlets. The man is an open book. This left Kirill’s side with unflattering holes. But the opera company’s hands were tied. Apparently under instructions from the artist, nobody could even confirm he lives in Munich (where he has drawn a paycheck for 30 months already). And he may not.
Bavarian State Opera: “What’s not to understand about ‘Mr. Petrenko does not wish to answer any personal questions’? Who puts out the rule that a conductor … does have to comprehend or be willing to be part of public relations? … So, in fact, we do not want to convey anything to anybody. This is the ‘line to be drawn’ from our side.”
Mention of Vasily went over badly. BStO: “What kind of idea is it anyways to compare two artists because they share the same last name?” Prepared descriptors accompanied the rhetoric: “ridiculous” and a “game.” How not to kill a story.
Shown the data for the above table, the opera company took to sarcasm: “Yes, sure, [inventing] height and weight [measurements] is of course totally acceptable.” But Kirill’s height had become public half a year ago* at ARD broadcaster Deutsche Welle. BStO did not either know this or wish to share the knowledge. Its hapless official scanning DW: “Oh, it’s on the Internet! It’s gotta be true!”
[*Earlier actually: Lucas Wiegelmann included it in an excellent 2014 discussion for Die Welt.]
Photos © Bayerische Staatsoper (Kirill Petrenko), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (Vasily Petrenko)
Related posts:
Petrenko’s Sharper Boris
Portraits For a Theater
Bieito Hijacks Boris
Nazi Document Center Opens
Petrenko to Extend in Munich
Tags:Ain Anger, Alexander Tsymbalyuk, Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Boris Godunov, Commentary, Kirill Petrenko, München, Munich, Mussorgsky, News, Oslo Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Sergei Skorokhodov, Vasily Petrenko
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
90 Years and Counting: The Martha Graham Dance Company
Sunday, April 17th, 2016By Rachel Straus
The Martha Graham Dance Company’s 90th anniversary season (April 14-18) at New York City Center opened with Graham’s Night Journey (1947) and closed with her Cave of the Heart (1946). In between these masterworks, about Greek tragedy heroines, was a world premiere by the experimentalist Marie Chouinard and the last proscenium work that the venerable Swedish choreographer Mats Ek said that he would ever make. Considering that Chouinard’s Inner Resources reads like an uninspired group of teenage competition dancers trying to look avant-garde and Ek’s Axe was both terrifying and beautiful, it is a tragedy that Ek will not be making more dances for the stage and that Chouinard will.
Axe (2015) was created on Ben Schultz and Peiju Chien-Pott, the most dramatically daring and physically chameleon-esque Graham dancer of her generation. Axe is about a couple in crisis. It was originally made by Eks as a film, featuring his wife and dancing muse Ana Lugana. At City Center, the dance begins with the sound of a heavy object falling, again and again. When the curtain goes up, Schultz wields an ax. He is splitting wood on a tree stump. In the course of the nine-minute ballet, set to a recording of the Albinoni-Giazotto Adagio in G minor, Schultz obsessively chops wood into smaller and smaller pieces—like a woodsman with a compulsive disorder. Because the music has been used in innumerable tragic films, including Gallipoli (1981), we know that this dance is not going to end well. Indeed, Schultz never looks up to notice a haggard Chien-Pott, teetering side to side, like an unsteady piece of brittle wood. She circles around Schultz, but he pays no mind. So Chien-Pott becomes increasingly manic, repeatedly falling to the floor, and extending her legs to all four corners as if trying to dislocate her limbs. Their tragic story, however, has a surprise ending: the petite female dancer fills Schultz’s enormous arms with wood and marches him to the wing. As the curtain falls, Chien-Pott raises the ax—it’s aimed at his head.
Graham (1894-1991) would likely have approved of Axe. It features all of the elements that made her 1940s masterworks radical and potent: a revenging female dancer, a movement vocabulary that sallies between the grotesque and the sublime, a compressed abstracted story, and a large muscular man who is easy on the eyes, and when given a chance, is shown to be a good dancer too.
Since the Graham company’s current mission is to commission choreographers to make works that bear a relationship to Graham’s oeuvre, it is nigh impossible to understand Chouinard’s Inner Resources as bearing any aesthetic relationship to Graham’s. It possesses the quality of an amateur music video, with its half-hearted Vogueing and some clumsy b-boy floor moves. The music by Louis Dufort, who has collaborated with Chouinard since 1996, produces the effect of listening to a DJ club mix that is inside of a food processor. The women upend the heteronormative by sporting big mustaches, but they also strut on the points of their feet like runway models. When they strip off their blue shirts and black pants, they stand inert as if their nudity makes them afraid to move. This last image isn’t exactly a feminist statement. The Graham company’s eight female dancers deserve better than this.
Fortunately, the performance of Cave of the Heart, with Chien-Pott playing the revenging Medea, salvaged the company’s image that night. The Mannes Orchestra, under the baton of David Hayes, supported the dancers in their ability to breathe life into the work’s dramatic personae. Chien-Pott, Abdiel Jackson, Anne O’Donnell and Leslie Andrea Williams’ artistic courage, and inventiveness, made this Graham ballet relevant and worth repeat viewings.
Tags:Abdiel Jackson, Albioni, Anne O’Donnell, Axe. Ben Schultz, Cave of the Heart, David Hayes, Inner Resources, Leslie Andrea Williams, Luis Dufort, Marie Chouinard, Martha Graham Dance Company, Mats Ek, New York City Center, Night Journey, Peiju Chien-Pott, Rachel Straus, The Mannes Orchestra
Posted in The Torn Tutu | Comments Closed
Nadia Sirota: Successful Kickstarter Campaigns
Friday, April 8th, 2016Violist Nadia Sirota has created several wildly successful Kickstarter campaigns. Here, Nadia shares ideas with Eugenia Zukerman and Emily Ondracek-Peterson of Noted Endeavors about fundraising videos, ask amounts, and how to create a winning projects.
Read more about Nadia:
nadiasirota.com
For more Noted Endeavors videos, go to:
notedendeavors.com
Posted in Noted Endeavors | Comments Closed
Matt Haimovitz: Questions to Ask When Starting an Endeavor
Friday, April 1st, 2016Cellist extraordinaire Matt Haimovitz presents the questions that any new endeavor needs to ask itself in this short but profound video with Eugenia Zukerman and Emily Ondracek-Peterson of Noted Endeavors.
In 2000, he made waves with his Bach “Listening-Room” Tour, for which, to great acclaim, Haimovitz took Bach’s beloved cello suites out of the concert hall and into clubs across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Haimovitz’s 50-state Anthem tour in 2003 celebrated living American composers, and featured his own arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” He was the first classical artist to play at New York’s infamous CBGB club, in a performance filmed by ABC News for “Nightline UpClose.” Soon thereafter, Haimovitz launched Oxingale Records with his wife, composer Luna Pearl Woolf. Oxingale records have since received wide acclaim for its stunning recordings.
To learn more about Matt, go to:
matthaimovitz.com
For more about Noted Endeavors, go to:
notedendeavors.com
Posted in Noted Endeavors | Comments Closed
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