PGS
– aka Private Guerilla Showcase.
We hosted a PGS
(private guerilla showcase) room for Folk Alliance International Conference in
New Orleans this year (2020). For those of you who don’t know, the
conference is a chance for music presenters to get to know performers and
vice versa. There are official
showcases, but not nearly enough stages for everyone to present on the official stages. The
official showcases are juried, the standards are very high, and if you get an
official showcase you are very lucky.
We have attended 4 FAI
Conferences in the last four years. The
first one was with our partner, Gen Obata as Cosmo’s Dream. It was held in Kansas City, which was handy
because Gen’s wife Rebecca has a sister who lives there who was kind enough to
offer us a place to stay. The second
year Kristi and I went without Gen, but we still stayed with Rebecca’s sister
and husband. We volunteered for the
conference, which interfered with attending showcases.
The third year the FAI
conference was held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. We decided to amp up our carbon footprint and
fly. We also attended as
bloggers/journalists which got. attendance fees paid. Being
a writer is a good deal because you have a good excuse to talk to interesting
people.
In 2020 we attended as
writers and also hosted a PGS room. That
involved booking every night from 10:30 pm to 3 am. I was a bit worried
about staying up that late every night, but it turned out to not be a big
problem, as we booked interesting acts into the room and they kept us
entertained, and awake although we could be a bit cranky by the time 3am rolled
around.
When you register as a
PGS host you are put on a list and start to receive email from artists. Out of the email you receive you offer spots
in your room to the people who you like.
It can take awhile. I spent quite
a bit of time looking at people on Youtube, reading bios and considering what I
wanted the room to sound like. In any
case in the end we had a great lineup, and I was mondo happy with the
performers. We met a lot of people, and
heard a lot of great music.
Angela Saini - a fine Canadian singer-songwriter
PGS rooms are just
hotel rooms. Some of the hosts have the
beds taken out of the room and book another hotel room to stay in. The hotels charge quite a hefty amount to get
beds out of the rooms, but they had mistakenly taken the beds out of our room,
and we were planning to stay in the PGS room we were hosting. We actually had to ask them to replace one of
the beds so we would have someplace to sleep.
The hotels also will rent chairs to you for a small fee. We had ten folding chairs, which was plenty
for our room, although we had people standing at the back of the room for some
acts.
I suppose you could
simply book acts into your room, wait for them to show up and play and that would
be that. The idea though is to make a
room comfortable enough so that performers will feel at ease, and people will
want to come into your room to see/hear your performers. Many hosts of PGS rooms flew in and thus just used the decor of the Sheraton as their backdrop, but we had the advantage of having an SUV to bring a bit of flair for a "stage" backdrop. We erected a large cloth, bought lamee stars to attach to it, and set digital floor lights on it to give the audience a sense of stage presence for the performers. It was gratifying in that the room filled up consistently and the players loved it. There is also the matter of publicity to be
considered. It is pretty easy, but is, of course, one more chore. We had a color poster on our door each night
announcing who would be playing and what time they would be on. That was about it on our end. The conference puts out a book with
everybody’s PGSs in it, so if you have someone who is particularly popular (and
we had a few), the room will be full of people.
One of the problems
with having showcases in hotel rooms is the matter of noise in the
hallways. It is advantageous to most acts to have the hotel room door open so
people passing by can see, and hear what is going on in your room. The downside to this is that there is traffic
going by all night long going from room to room and it can generate quite a bit
of noise for the artists to compete with.
This is problematic in varying degrees depending on how loud the
performers are (how well they can compete with ambient noise). The organizers gave us signs to put on the
doors cautioning people to keep the noise down in the halls, but as the nights
wore on the hallway noise was louder and louder.
.
Another thing you can
do with performers is video them. I did
do this, although I haven’t had a chance to look at the video yet. As I say, different performers do well in an
acoustic (non-amplified) room, and others don’t have the strength in their
vocals to get over their guitars, or the ambient noise from the hallway. I just put a camera up and let it run. Most of the time I didn’t cut anyone’s head
off, and I ran a digital audio recorder as well as cameras don’t really give
you great audio.
One thing I haven’t
mentioned is that it is customary to have a small charge to help pay for the
hotel room. It is usually between $15 to
$30. As I’ve said, we paid for chairs as
well as the room rental, put up lights, and a backdrop. It meant that we missed a lot of the events
in the conference due to sleep compensation, and generally having our
activities be centered around being a PGS host.
That said, we did see some great showcases and attended a couple of
workshops. We are looking forward to the
next Folk Alliance International Conference February 17-21, 2021 in Kansas
City, MO. This year’s FAR-West (Folk
Alliance, Region West) conference will be held in San Jose, CA October 8-11,
2020. Make new friends, hear great music
and attend.
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