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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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