markets

The Arts Presenters Conference is a gigantic marketplace. The largest commodity exchange floor in the world for the trade in live performing arts. The buyers are the arts presenters - theaters, arts councils, universities, festivals, any organization that books and presents artists. The sellers are the artists - there are showcases from 8am to 11pm of artists touting their wares. The brokers are the agents - 3 floors of booths in the exhibition halls of the New York Hilton.

The buyers have purchasing power. The sellers have the creative power of their product. And ultimately, it's their message that gets put out on the stage. But it's dependent on the buyers giving them a stage. The brokers' power lies in the relationships they have with the buyers and and the hotness of the product they represent.

Several times a day I remind myself that I can do markets. Almost every Sunday of my childhood, I accompanied my father to Nagara market - Nairobi's huge open-air fruit and vegetable market, to buy the week's food. Hundreds of tiny stalls crammed into narrow dirt alleyways, with little mounds of chillies and beans, pyramids of fruit, onions, tomatoes, bunches of spinach, kale, greens, laid out on sacks. Buyers assessing, fingering, sniffing, squeezing, bargaining. Sellers calling, cajoling, promoting, hustling, bargaining.

I walk through the concourses of the Hilton; fix my mind on my own roadmap of what I'm here to do; tell myself: "It's just Nagara market, to the power of 100."