Bob Barrett recently hit a low point in his career as a dance impresario. After hiring students to put up posters for the concert he’s producing this weekend and carefully explaining the procedure (go into businesses, ask permission to put the posters up, etc), he discovered that many had been improperly posted. And the city charges for each illegally placed flyer. “So there I was at 11:30 on a cold, rainy Sunday night, ripping down posters on Clybourn,” he says. He removed 75 of them that night, praying the whole time, “Please don’t let me be fined, God.”
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Barrett is a massage therapist with a good-sized contingent of dance clients who’s doing something unheard-of: spending $16,000 of his own money–no subsidies or grants are involved–to put on a two-day program of duets over the Valentine’s Day weekend. His first venture into the world of concert promotion was only last September. Touched by his clients’ lack of funds and by their dedication to their art, he spent his entire annual advertising budget to stage a concert at Northeastern Illinois University called “For Clients Only.” He hadn’t really intended to take on another concert so quickly, but the Athenaeum Theatre offered him the Valentine’s weekend and things just fell into place. Originally he planned to spend no more than $10,000 on “Duets for My Valentine,” but things have a way of costing more than you think.
Nevertheless, Barrett has some ideas about how to make dance a better sell. Because he believes that dance is often misunderstood–that people need to be trained how to watch it–he asked each choreographer to write a sentence or two for the program. He also thinks there’s a huge untapped audience for dance out there: men. He’s pushing this concert of duets as a “classy” Valentine’s date. “You go out, you watch some beautiful people in beautiful motions–it’s two hours of foreplay. It’s an aphrodisiac.”
