Woe to journalists at an arts festival

I remember the first public relations pitch I ever made"“ to Howard Shapiro at the Inquirer, about the Walnut Street Theatre's trip to Europe. Shapiro wasn't at his desk, but I left a message, palm sweating on my office phone.

Howard didn't want to do the story, but he did take the time to call me back and politely say so— a rare courtesy, I found in subsequent years of PR work. Since I made the transition from PR to full-time freelance arts journalism a few years ago, I try to take Shapiro's gracious example with me into the weekly blizzard of pitches I now receive from Philadelphia's arts groups (even as every event I attend begins to look like a forest of limbs waving promotional post cards at me).

But I must confess to faltering when an event like the recent Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts sprawls across the city.

As the latest citywide festival approached, the Kimmel Center bombarded the region's stalwart arts writers with roughly three press releases per minute, with headlines like "PIFA 2013 TIME MACHINE REVVING ITS ENGINES!" I knew I'd better rev my engines, too.

More troupes, fewer journalists

Given my own experience on the other side of the press table, I sympathize with hard-working PR professionals and all the troupes and patrons who are dismayed by shrinking arts coverage at the Inquirer and other mass media. But as the number of professional arts outlets and writers dwindle, the number of pitches I field on a daily basis seems to have grown exponentially in the past few years.

Would I like to write about a program that uses "mural-making, digital photography, airbrush, tape art and product design to explore personal/cultural/geographical identities"?

Sure (even if I don't know what "tape art" is)— as long as the program doesn't overlap with the four events I'm already covering this week, in addition to my regular non-festival feature assignments.

Occasionally press releases do pique my curiosity, like this one from Laurel Hill Cemetery, inviting me to a "Coffin Craft Night":

"We'll provide the materials for decorating your own mini coffin box, and you bring the creativity. Your one-of-a-kind coffin keepsake will look great displayed at home or make the perfect gift for a friend."

Translation, please

But if you lined up all of the festival's press releases and media alerts that I've received since February, they'd reach from the Earth to the moon. Robotic scientists would be well advised to call the Kimmel's PR office— there's no way a team of human beings could have cranked out so many press releases in just nine weeks.

And yet, even as assignments for coverage of festival events piled up, I struggled to divine what any of those press releases actually meant to say. Consider the lead of this missive about a Time Machine in the Kimmel lobby:

"Taking its shape from DNA, tornadoes, the Hadron Collider, sound waves, and an EKG, an impressively large Time Machine (100 feet long and 16 feet in diameter) spirals across the Kimmel Center Plaza…"

It takes time to read such releases and figure out what the heck they're all about. Often I came away none the wiser. But perhaps that was the Kimmel's plan all along: When I received the invitation for the festival's press preview in late March, I RSVP'd out of sheer curiosity.

The Time Machine, up close

The press kit, which contained 13 separate items (the longest of which had a dozen double-sided pages), weighed almost as much as an issue of Vogue.

Finally, there it was, the Time Machine in all its glory: a walkway through a large, expensive-looking swirl of metal and fabric, hauntingly lit with cool washes of color and spiraling highlights, full of subtle rumblings and heartbeats. Colored LED lights hung inside mysterious, translucent acrylic cylinders, and some kind of twisting cosmic light projection decorated the far end.

Touch-screen booths were stationed several feet from the end, where participants could sit down, enter their e-mail address, birth date and hometown, and navigate a menu of world events by category. (The Kimmel, having captured your e-mail address, graciously offered the chance to opt out of its marketing blasts.)

Huh.

$12 cocktails

One compensation of most press events is the free food. But the festival's preview event offered $2 donuts smaller than my palm, $4 mini-tacos, and $12 cocktails with names like "Flux Capacitor."

Notwithstanding the demand for my services lately, a freelance arts journalist's earnings don't cover $12 cocktails. So I escaped with only one or two postcards in my purse.

Don't get me wrong— I love the arts, and I love my work, which has exposed me to everything from August Wilson to art therapy for anorexics. After graduating from Arcadia University, I stayed in Philadelphia because the city struck me as a place where a young person really could forge her own career in a thriving arts scene.

But now that this biennial Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts is winding down and I haven't received one of its press releases for almost 24 hours, I admit I'm glad it'll be two years before I have to type the phrase "produced in partnership with PIFA" again.

Now I can get on with booking the features I'll write this summer. And then… oh, hell. Only five months to FringeArts.♦


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