Katy Tucker draws on her experience working at an orchestra, as an agent, and now as Director of Artistic Planning at a performing arts presenter to overview these distinct avenues for bringing the arts to life!

Interview of Katy Tucker, Cal Performances’ Director of Artistic Planning, by Krista Thomas, Cal Performances’ Associate Director of Communications

Katy Tucker joined Cal Performances in 2019 and leads the organization’s Artistic Planning team, which (in collaboration with Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen) manages everything from what goes on the season and when, to what each artist’s contract looks like. A classically trained vocalist, Tucker has served in a variety of roles across the industry. In this Q&A, she draws on her own experience at different types of organizations to explain what a performing arts presenter is, how an organization like Cal Performances hires artists, and the types of choices presenters make/how they work with artists on the type of repertoire/range of styles they can put on stage, among other notable distinctions.

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What is the difference between a performing arts presenter (like Cal Performances) and a resident company (e.g., the Metropolitan Opera, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, San Francisco Symphony)?

The two represent different business models, and a different way of programming. A resident company, such as an orchestra or an opera company or a ballet company, employs not only a core staff of professional administrative employees, but also full-time and part-time artists. So, the number of employees is significantly greater, and payroll constitutes a very large part of their annual budget as a result.

As a performing arts presenter, Cal Performances employs a large number of mostly full-time administrative staff, but we do not employ artists full time. Rather, we have short-term contracts that span one or a few days (ranging from one to at most seven performances in that window) with a greater number of artists throughout our season. The variety of our presentations requires a skilled administrative staff focused on education, production, marketing, fundraising, and other business infrastructure necessary to provide our artists with a fertile creative environment in which to deliver world-class performances for our audiences.

How does this difference in business models impact when an arts organization can schedule and what they can program?

If you take orchestras or opera companies for example, most have contracts with their artists that guarantee employment for a certain number of weeks per season. For a large orchestra like my former employer, that’s a 52-week per year contract. This guarantees a certain number of “services” per week, with services being either rehearsals or performances. So, from a programming perspective, resident companies are looking to satisfy their services per week, which causes most opera companies and particularly orchestras to have a very standard schedule of rehearsal days, performance days, and off days each week. Because we as a presenter do not have these types of parameters within which we must schedule, we have far greater flexibility when it comes to the actual calendaring of performances.

And from a programming standpoint, it opens us up to so many different possibilities. Because an orchestra employs a large number of musicians and focuses on orchestral repertoire, they tend to perform programs that feature the majority of their ensemble; it often does not make economic sense to program for a smaller number of musicians. Since we do not have a resident company, we may employ any combination of artists we desire while keeping an eye on finding the right mix of large- and smaller-scale projects.

How does the audience experience differ when regularly attending a repertory company versus a presenter?

Making some generalizations here, if you’re buying a subscription to a residency company, you will mostly see the same performers on stage and/or a similar style of performance. For example, with an orchestra, you’d see the same orchestra week after week, and while the soloists and conductor and the repertoire will change, it will all be within a defined spectrum. With theater, while there will be new productions, you know you’re always going to see straight plays or musicals when going to the same company. This is a great way to deepen your relationship with certain artists as well as to dive deeply into a particular style of performance and all the nuance that comes with it.

The excitement of Cal Performances and other presenters is that, on any given season, you could come a handful of times and experience something incredibly different with each visit. You can truly get a little bit of everything. For example, you can attend an intimate recital and have a really personal and contemplative experience with a single artist; and then the next evening you can see an internationally renowned ballet company and have 50 dancers on stage and as many musicians in the pit, and it’s just spectacle and unbelievable raw talent and discipline. I think one of Cal Performances’ greatest strengths is our commitment to quality, so even if you aren’t entirely certain what it is you’re going to see, you can be assured it has been selected and brought to our stages because it represents excellence, and the very best of what we can put on the stage at that time.

While this question is about audience experience, I do think it’s interesting to briefly talk about how the creative experience differs for the artists, because that can shape your appreciation for what you see on stage. With repertory companies, particularly in dance and theater, those performers may be putting on the same show for 10, 15, 20 performances, and it’s a particular skill set to be able to keep a character fresh and vital during that time—to deliver something night after night that is cohesive and within the general expectation of the production, and yet still find ways to grow the character, to respond to feedback and make new choices and inflections as the run progresses. This process is very different than that of a touring musician, for example, who is in a different hall, a different city, dealing with a different set of energies to adjust to day over day. Variability is built into that performance style, and so it leans more heavily on one’s adaptability to respond to a greater spectrum of variables.

With each artist/company having a different agent and different space and scheduling needs, how do you fit all the pieces together to start building a season at Cal Performances?

On the whole, I’d say that the cycle is as follows for us: when we are two to three seasons out, there are some long-term partners and major artistic investments we know will be on the season in question, but most is still to be determined. It’s around this time that we invest time into talking with agents and listening to artists and others in the industry about what programs might be available during that time frame. We compile all this information and it leaves us with a large pool of projects we could potentially fit together into a season, and then we consider things like the artistic balance of each combination, what our Illuminations theme will be that year, what budget we have to allocate. We also consider what types of performances were on the seasons before and might be on the seasons after so we can represent a wider range of genres across multiple seasons. It’s not generally until fall the season before that the budgeting has been done and enough artists have signed on that I feel much more sure of the general shape of the season, and then it goes from a theoretical plan to something that has to be put into action.

In terms of when each genre of performance is scheduled, every season at Cal Performances is unique. That said, there are a handful of artists, companies, and organizations who we have annual or biannual relationships with, and those traditions provide a great place to start—they lend a certain contour to the season before we fully dive into programming.

In terms of scheduling, typically we start with orchestras and dance companies, often a number of seasons in advance. These performances tend to have a large impact on our budget and require a lot of space and time for both the performance and days of rehearsals. As mentioned previously, orchestras in particular have a lot of structure in their scheduling, so they tend to plan their travel with a lot of lead time. With dance companies, a company is more likely to visit if we can route a west coast tour together with other presenters, so we do the work of coordinating with other presenting colleagues to see if we can collectively entice the dance groups with a rough outline of a tour.

Theater and interdisciplinary projects come a bit later. They seem like they would have a long throw in programming, but because they are often either incredibly ambitious new creations or a reimagining of a work, there tends to be a lot of iteration on their end, especially when it is a premiere. This means that we have a better chance of securing a solid event description and date as well as an understanding of spatial/logistic needs as we get closer to the relevant season. With theater in particular, it can be challenging to find the right kind of performance for Cal Performances because we aren’t built to create a huge infrastructure that would stand for 10 or 20 performances of a piece, which is what most theater companies are used to, so it takes a lot of communication with agents and artists to figure out whether or not the project is a good fit.

Then once we have the more serious artistic pieces determined, we try to add in some more lighthearted entertaining performances to provide a balance. We also schedule our recital series much later in the game. Thankfully, Jeremy Geffen’s intimate knowledge of classical music and his relationship with classical musicians makes the recital series pretty easy to plan, and it just becomes a matter of juggling individual people’s availability, making sure we don’t have the exact same repertoire or style of performance many weekends in a row, etc.

What are the specific things that challenge you and those that excite you in programming in a presenter environment?

The two are the same for me—the specific challenges are the things that I enjoy. The entire process is very complicated, because it’s portfolio management on so many x and y axes that all have to come together at once—the size of the venue, the abilities of the venue you have at your disposal, when the artists are available… Sometimes there are projects we can’t live without, but all the other presenters in our area who want to book it and make up the tour can only schedule around a time that is really challenging for us, and so we have to find ways to make that work. Perhaps the hardest thing for me is accepting when a plan isn’t perfect, but we still need to move forward because it is so important to us to make a commitment to that particular artist, creator, or production.

The fun of programming at Cal Performances is that we have a portfolio of venues that can do nearly anything, and so you have the freedom to do the best of whatever is out there. Many presenter colleagues of mine don’t have that flexibility in their programming—they may have to rent a theater for a specific project, which can be costly, or they may only have the option to use a venue during specific dates. The fact that we can present such an incredible range of performances 365 days a year is really amazing and makes my job that much more exciting.

What is the unique benefit of having a performing arts presenter on the UC Berkeley campus?

The unique benefit of having a presenter in any town is that that presenter is bringing a curatorial perspective on international artists to your city, and bringing along with it a variety of perspectives, traditions, and disciplines to enrich the cultural life of anyone who experiences those artists. In terms of why this is incredible for us in particular, the population of Berkeley is not that large, and so it’s hard to imagine that a city of this size could support a presenter at Cal Performances’ level without the infrastructure of UC Berkeley, without the energy of UC Berkeley, and without the public focus on UC Berkeley that can direct attention to what we are doing.

I grew up in a relatively small town, population of about 30,000, and I had to drive nearly two hours to see anything even close to the level of artistry that Cal Performances is presenting. And that’s life in most places. Having a major university in your town makes it possible for you to have a science museum for kids, fun sports teams to go see on weekends, presenting organizations… It brings an infrastructure and vitality to a city that a small town without a university just cannot support.

There’s also no denying that the curiosity and accumulated energy that result from a large group of people coming together to learn collectively is absolute rocket fuel on the fire of creativity, and it’s wonderful.

Now that we’ve provided an explanation of how all these facets of the performing arts work objectively, could you describe how they have played a role in your own journey working in the performing arts?

I grew up singing and went to NYU to continue my studies in the performing arts, but I had already decided before I enrolled that I didn’t want to pursue a career as a performer. As I was looking for my place in the performing arts, I took a role in the public relations department at the New York Philharmonic, which is where I met Jeremy Geffen, who was a (very young) VP of Artistic Planning at the time. After I had been around the orchestra for a bit, I knew I had an interest in the programming side of things and asked Jeremy if I could be his intern. I began an internship in artistic programming at age 19, which turned into a full-time job after I graduated.

I loved working for an orchestra because—this sounds like something that would be easy to take for granted, but I never did—I had a speaker in my office and I could turn it on and hear the New York Philharmonic rehearsing or performing onstage in Avery Fisher Hall [now David Geffen Hall—no relation to Jeremy Geffen] while I was sitting there doing my emails and writing my contracts, and there was just this immediacy of music-making that is really unbelievable. Just four stories down from me while I was twiddling away at my paperwork , there was an incredibly talented group of people performing at an intensely high level. Jeremy always encouraged me to go down and watch rehearsals, which was really interesting because there were a number of conductors who would come through, each with different styles and interpretations, and layered on top of that you have orchestra members navigating their own way of playing their part or their own interpretation on the music.

So, I loved working at the New York Phil, but after a few years, I realized that I never got to hear any other ensembles perform because I was always in Avery Fisher Hall, and I wanted to branch out. There were two women who represented composers whom I had worked with because the New York Phil had been commissioners on projects they were representing. I was really fascinated by what they did, and through a series of conversations with them, they offered me a job at their publishing firm where I was able to represent artistic creators. In many ways, it was kind of the exact opposite of my job at the Phil: I had no band, I wasn’t connected to any performing arts organization; instead I was connected to composers, I was learning about compositional language and perspectives, and the history that each of those composers carried with them. That role scratched the itch I had to see a range of musicians. I ended up traveling to see orchestras, operas, and chamber music all over the US and Europe. I heard so much new music and I really worked on my listening skills in that job more than anything else, and my ability to think critically about what I had just heard aside from “that was really lovely.”

I did that job for a long time and loved it, although I did get a little burnt out on the travel eventually. When I moved to California, I ventured into this new role at Cal Performances and it turned out, unbeknownst to me, that a presenting organization actually marries these two things that I loved so perfectly: there’s music and art on the stage all the time, and I get to see all kinds of different art. It’s truly the best of the best of both worlds. And from a programming perspective, the sky is the limit, and from an audience perspective, the sky is the limit. I never get bored of what happens at Cal Performances because it’s never the same.