The Audience Guide | Enriching The Experience
Welcome to The Audience Guide; a resource for planning your arts and cultural adventures in the Lehigh Valley.
The site is building over the next two months, focusing on regions, venues, art organizations, artists, and other ideas to make your planning easier.
We welcome ideas and feedback any time! Email: AudienceGuideInfo@gmail.com
Background
Creative parents nurtured me. While they were not artists or performers by profession, our home was filled with Italian opera on the stereo, hootenannies on the first Friday of the month, and a full appreciation of art, craft and culture. My mother took craft classes at night to give her a break from raising five children born within six years. She was clever in the kitchen, and frequently signed me and my siblings up for enrichment programs at local libraries, summer school, ballet classes, scouts,… anything to get us out of the house for her sanity. My older siblings introduced me to the more “popular” music of the 1970s. They bought their own albums and had stereo wars between the bedrooms. We also got heavily involved in the CYO band and school theater programs. I entered college to pursue a career as a music teacher. In my first year at Lawrence University, I switched instruments from flute to bassoon and managed to graduate within four years with a Bachelor of Music in bassoon performance. In the ten years that followed, I earned two Masters of Music degrees from Bowling Green Sate University and a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the […]
Philosophy
Are you the kind of person who likes to explore the DVD extras? Do you linger through the end credits of a movie to find how who did what, or where it was shot? (And did you do this before Marvel added the extra scene after the end credits?) Do you want to know more about art than what’s listed on the museum label? Do you read reviews of books or inside jacket covers AFTER you’ve read a book? Do you listen to Broadway musical albums while following the lyrics? Have you ever experienced something in a theatre, only to walk to your car and wonder, “Huh?” Do you ever wonder how that chandelier/dessert bombe/gravity defying emboîté happened? (<- Yeah, did you see my fancy French ballet term?) Do you love having conversations with friends about details you noticed in a movie, or share an incredible experience you had in a restaurant? Have you experienced a sore neck and throat after a night of dancing and singing in a local club? Have you noticed that the laugh in a crowded hall is greater than one you’d have alone in your living room? Do you seek out new adventure? To boldly […]
Intentions
The Audience Guide will connect to available web based calendars, other excellent bloggers, other content providers, arts organization websites, traditional media, local news stories, and personal relationships to build a resource for audiences to use for their personal planning and exploration. The Audience Guide is part concierge, part maître ‘d, part tour guide, part docent, part teacher, part cheerleader, part mom, and part neighbor. That’s a lot of parts. The Audience Guide will be compiled to help site visitors become familiar with the arts scene, the venues, the folks that make it happen, and available media resources for their own planning use as well. Hopefully, much of the gathering and linking on the Audience Guide will make searching for ideas and information a little easier to get off your couch and explore or try something new. The Audience Guide is made with love. Love for the arts, love for the artists, love for the Lehigh Valley, but mostly, love for the audiences. You make this community a full circle of creativity and cultural expression. Over the next two months, the Audience Guide will emerge like the phoenix from the smoldering ash… The Audience Guide is like a newborn baby. It […]