Monday, September 28, 1998
Student-run arts board gives UCLA discounted tickets
ON-CAMPUS: Funded by reg fees, committee cuts prices, produces
events
By Megan Dickerson
Daily Bruin Staff
It may be a student’s best defense against rising ticket
prices.
Every Monday night, a little-known group of 20 aspiring
historians, chemists, musicians, lawyers and dancers meets to
decide how UCLA Performing Arts will reach the average student.
They screen, bargain, and bankroll – but perhaps the most important
thing they do is cut.
The Student Committee for the Arts (SCA), an appointed group of
about nine undergraduate and nine graduate students, is, in its
simplest form, a ticket bargain bin. Each year, the commission,
which is funded by student registration fees and sponsored by the
UCLA Center for the Performing Arts, stocks up $100,000 in tickets.
They then snip away with budgetary scissors, knocking at least $1
off already reduced student tickets to every show in the Performing
Arts’ season.
In the end, the Center for the Performing Arts’ largest single
subscriber presents admission at the Central Ticket Office for up
to half the normal $20-$30 ticket costs.
"It’s like scalping in reverse," says Michael Blachely, director
of the Center for the Performing Arts.
Blachely says SCA’s role as ticket middleman for the
often-expensive Center gives students a once-in-a-lifetime chance
to get the best seats, up to one month in advance.
On top of reduced student prices, SCA produces 30 to 40 events
per year, including last year’s Jazz at the Wadsworth Series,
billed by the acronym JAWS. Some events pair UCLA musicians with
world-class entertainers, as when Herbie Hancock played with the
UCLA Jazz Ensemble in 1996.
Other events will take a trendsetting approach, concentrating on
ways of presentation yet to be accepted in mainstream arts
management. Since the committee was instigated by Chancellor Murphy
in 1962, SCA has been a forerunner in the promotion of art forms
like spoken word, performance art and even jazz.
"When jazz started out, it was really seen as an illegitimate
art form, and now it’s being embraced by all the major presenters,"
says John Henson, advisor to SCA from 1986 to Spring 1998.
SCA, he says, began producing its jazz series years before the
Center for the Performing Arts or other venues put the genre into
its regular season.
"(SCA) had a spoken word series when that was kind of a new
concept," Henson says. "This was in the mid-’80s, and they were
doing a lot of punk artists who actually had a lot of provocative
lyrics that were getting missed in their live performances."
Performers like Kirk Kirkwood from the Meat Puppets, Henry
Rollins from Black Flag and Drew Steele from the Surf Punks read
song lyrics in Kerckhoff Coffeehouse, while Jane’s Addiction
performed in the Cooperage.
The group also attempts to fill voids left by lack of funding or
experience availability. In its patron-of-the-arts role, SCA puts
UCLA performers into arts productions, sponsoring ethnic group’s
cultural nights and funding student acting ensembles. In 1988, the
committee spearheaded an acting showcase in response to student
complaints that there weren’t enough production parts in the
theater department.
"Students in the theater department were getting frustrated that
they weren’t … getting cast for the major production each
quarter," says Henson. "They’re actually students in the
department, and they weren’t able to get into the production. As
well as a lot of the writers, and it was even tougher for them to
get their plays produced."
So, Henson says, the committee created a student drama showcase
where student playwrights or student groups could produce their own
play. SCA put 12 groups into the Neuropsychiatric Institute
auditorium, which seats about 250, and gave each group a stipend
for costumes and sets.
This outreach, however, is not the only goal of SCA, says its
new advisor, Charlene Kellet. Rather, SCA’s goal is two-pronged: to
provide cut ticket rates and arts involvement to the student body,
and to give committee members experience in arts management. So, in
a way, some of the committee’s primary beneficiaries are the
committee members themselves.
"What’s really great about it is that you actually get to work
with the performers, the artists, the managers, the agents, the
production crews and the media," Kellet says.
Involvement in SCA lets students inside and outside the UCLA
School for the Arts bulk up on entertainment industry experience.
For the incoming freshman who dabbled in oils one summer but
decided to major in biology, a major outside the scope of the arts
is no demerit on the committee, which actively courts academic
diversity to better represent the student body.
According to SCA Co-Chair Sally Bogadashian, a third-year
international economics student, member’s majors run the gamut from
engineering to world arts and cultures.
"You don’t even have to major in the arts if you’re on this
committee," Bogadashian says. "We have such diversity in majors. We
have chemistry on this committee."
"Because there are so many parts, we are really a kind of arts
management kind of program," says advisor Kellet. "We have a budget
director, and it would be great to have someone with an accounting
background, or a communications major as a marketing director, or
the arts education liaison an education major."
The committee recruits new members every October, allowing
freshmen and transfers to join. Any UCLA student may apply, with
applications available at the Central Ticket Office or in almost
any departmental office. Seven undergraduate and seven graduate
students are chosen as voting members, plus four non-voting
members. Returning members must also re-apply each year, to keep
the voting pool fresh.
SCA looks for a broad representation of the campus in its
selection process, says former SCA advisor Henson.
"In fact the majority of the students are not in the school of
the arts," Henson says. "We’ve had business students, law students,
dental students, computer science … so we’re really representing
the students, and it’s not just the arts students preaching to the
choir."
The committee’s reduced price tickets, which are available only
at the Central Ticket Office and not the Royce Hall box office, go
on sale four weeks before a performance. SCA produces its own
version of the Center for the Performing Arts’ season brochures,
which lists ticket prices and SCA events. Information is also
posted in SCA’s "What’s Art?" advertisement, published every
Thursday in the Daily Bruin.
What baffles the advisors most is that students do not always
take advantage of the committee’s cheap tickets. Despite the
group’s flyers and other forms of advertisement, Henson says a lot
of students don’t realize how good they had it with SCA ticket
prices until they are alumnae.
"I mean there’s just competition with 20 movie theaters right in
Westwood Village, and the parties on fraternity and sorority row,"
Henson says. "So it’s just letting people know these things are
going on right here. Like I said, it’s an ongoing awareness
campaign."
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