Tag Archives: arts funding

Link Roundup! – 6/17/16

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Onlookers watch as the ZUMIX drum group of East Boston kicks off the third "town hall" forum in the Boston Creates planning process. (Jeremy D. Goodwin for WBUR)

Onlookers watch as the ZUMIX drum group of East Boston kicks off the third “town hall” forum in the Boston Creates planning process. (Jeremy D. Goodwin for WBUR)

The ARTery reports on the policy announcements surrounding the new cultural plan, which is being released today:

In what City Hall is billing as a major policy speech, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was set to announce on Friday a series of initiatives aimed at bolstering the city’s arts scene.

In line with the recommendations of a newly minted master plan for the arts ecosphere, the measures include city-led efforts as well as partnerships with philanthropies, area museums and other outside groups. In some cases, specific dollar contributions are promised; in others, organizations are pledging in-kind donations in the form of facility space or professional expertise.

Included is a new grant-making program aimed at small arts organizations, with funds earmarked for the creation of new work.

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The Conversation examines the dialogue about diversity that surrounded this year’s Tony Awards:

It’s not clear whether the diversity represented in this season’s Tony Awards is a flash in the pan or a positive sign of things to come. It isn’t the first season to feature a number of diverse actors and casts. The 1996 Tony Award season included August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars,” the musical “Rent” and George C. Wolfe’s black history musical “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk.”

The next season, however, featured predominantly white shows: “A Doll’s House,” “Chicago,” “Titanic” and a Broadway revival of “The Gin Game.” Thus, without structural changes, this unusually diverse Broadway season is unlikely to continue. In fact, much of the diversity being touted is simply tied to one group, African-Americans. A closer look at the data shows that the diversity needle has actually regressed.

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Link Roundup! – 1/22/16

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Mayor Marty Walsh during last year’s State of the City address.

Mayor Marty Walsh during last year’s State of the City address.

Mayor Walsh has unveiled a new plan to increase arts funding and support:

As outlined in Tuesday night’s State of the City address at Symphony Hall, the programs will provide direct grants to individual artists, expand the city’s fledgling artist-in-residence program, and establish an artist resource desk at City Hall, which officials said would act as a central information hub for artists working in the city.

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The Boston Globe has a report on the state of Boston arts funding compared to arts funding around the country:

Boston places near the top of 11 major cities across the United States in the number of nonprofit cultural organizations in the city and the revenue they earn. But the city’s wealth of arts organizations receive comparatively meager foundation and corporate support, are overburdened with facilities costs, and place dead last in per-capita government funding for the arts.

“The good news is that this confirms that we’re punching way above our weight in terms of the health, vitality, and size of the cultural sector in this city,” said Paul Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation. “The bad news is, compared to other cities, certain kinds of financial support that other cities have put in place are not in place here, and that’s a particularly difficult thing for the small- and medium-size organizations.”

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Link Roundup – 11/6/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Photograph: Mark Douet

Photograph: Mark Douet

The Guardian has an article asking organizations to consider how they impact the local communities that don’t necessarily see their work:

Every theatregoer has an example of a play that changed their life to a greater or lesser extent. However, the real question I reckon theatres need to ask themselves is not whether what they do impacts on those who go to their shows but whether what goes on in their building really has a significant impact for those who have never stepped inside it? This is not about an individual’s response and relationship to a particular show in a particular building, but about a play and a venue’s relationship to the community at large.

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The LA Times has a story summing up the recent stats surrounding theatre donors and attendance:

Theaters are making adjustments by trying new approaches, she said, including more emphasis on shows geared toward children and parents.

The report said that productions for young audiences were “a bright spot” in which attendance grew 12.9% between 2010 and 2014. But childrens’ series accounted for just 3% of total attendance at the 118 theaters surveyed over the five years.

“More theaters would benefit from producing high-quality programming for multigenerational audiences,” Eyring said. “Not only because the numbers tend to be on the rise, but it’s a way of engaging the next generation of theatergoers.”

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Link Roundup! – 8/28/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Caleen Sinnette Jennings, left, and Karen Zacarias are two of the playwrights whose works are being presented during the Women’s Voices Theater Festival. (Kirstin Franko)

Caleen Sinnette Jennings, left, and Karen Zacarias are two of the playwrights whose works are being presented during the Women’s Voices Theater Festival. (Kirstin Franko)

The Washington Post has a feature about the upcoming Women’s Voices Theatre Festival in D.C:

That throat-clearing you hear is the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, an unprecedented wave of world premiere plays by women that has already begun to take over Washington’s stages. It’s a coordinated attack on the nagging gender gap that no city has tried before, with 46 theaters offering 52 full productions of new works by women.

“As far as I know,” says festival co-producer Nan Barnett, “there’s never been anything this intensely focused, in this kind of time period, on full productions.”

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Vu Lee’s post on equitable funding on the Nonprofit with Balls blog has some good insight into the funding process and what makes grant applications accessible to organizations of all levels:

For the past few years, everyone has been talking about Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Cultural Competency. This is good. But when these things do not actually come with profound changes in systems and processes, they can actually cause more harm. Equity, in particular, has been a shiny new concept adopted by many funders. A basic tenet of equity in our line of work is that the communities that are most affected by societal problems are leading the efforts to address these challenges. And yet, many foundations’ application process is deeply inequitable, leaving behind the people and communities who are most affected by the injustices we as a sector are trying to address.

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Link Roundup! – 4/18/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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In the most recent post on Bitter Gertrude, Melissa Hillman examines the negative online reactions that the photo below received and how it highlights the importance of engaging with young audiences on their own terms:

Photo by Alvaro Garnero

Photo by Alvaro Garnero

We talk a lot about wanting to engage the rising generation in theatre, and I’m seeing a lot of “what can we do about this?” commentary on this picture. Listen: If you want to engage the rising generation, the first thing you need to do is stop lying to yourself about them. You’ll fail to engage them if you don’t approach them with honesty…This is exactly why 99.999% of “audience engagement strategies” fail miserably to bring in young, diverse audiences. This is why “tweet seats” failed. We’re not looking at this generation honestly. Instead we look at studies designed from the outset to confirm our hypotheses. We make assumptions about how the rising generation thinks and feels based on how they make us think and feel. We refuse to engage them on their own terms, instead dictating the terms to them and then blaming them for boorishness when they fail to meet them.

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Seth Lepore’s HowlRound essay about the importance of entrepreneurship and the blind many college theatre programs have about it has been getting lots of online buzz this week:

The blind spot of most college professors needs to be understood for what it is. A lot of college teachers who are tenure track have been in school their whole lives. Creating their own work has been in the context of academia and the relationship to both process and theory. Practitioners in the academy always have a place to rehearse and develop new work. They don’t have to worry whether people attend the performance and if it will break even or not. When showing a new work, they are part of an infrastructure that already subsidizes them. The business skill set doesn’t seem to fit into “What Would Artaud Do?” They are focused on students building a performance skill set. I’ve actually heard some of these well-meaning professors say “If they want that information, they can take a course with the business school.”

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Link Roundup! – 4/10//15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh. (Jeremiah Robinson/mayor’s office)

Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh. (Jeremiah Robinson/mayor’s office)

The WBUR ARTery featured this week’s presentation of the cities new cultural plan, Boston Creates, announced by Mayor Walsh and Julie Burros:

Boston Creates, or #BostonCreates, is the umbrella title for a 10-year plan to provide resources for the creative community, while engaging — and challenging — artists and audiences to articulate priorities for how those resources should be spent.

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The cast of How to Get Away With Murder. Photo by ABC Studios.

The cast of How to Get Away With Murder. Photo by ABC Studios.

Slate writer Aisha Harris spoke to several film and television actors of color about their experience during the recent “diversity boom” in Hollywood:

There’s also the question of what diversity actually means to casting directors. Wise characterizes the goal as “digestible diversity,” or a certain type of non-white look: Asian actors with typically American or European features (like freckles, she suggests); black women with a lighter skin complexion. You’ll go into an “all ethnicities” casting call, she tells me, and “without fail, you’ll wonder who got that [part], and it’ll be someone German (whose father is kind of half-black).” This perspective seems to have borne itself out in at least one particularly notable—and racist—casting call for the upcoming N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, which made headlines last year. In it, sought-after women were, whether intentionally or not, ranked in groups from “A” to “D” by race, class, and skin tone. (Group B, for instance, consisted of “fine girls,” who “should be light-skinned.” Group D, on the other hand, was listed as “African American girls. Poor, not in good shape. Medium to dark skin tone.”)

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Link Roundup! – 3/6/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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August Wilson; Photo: David Cooper

August Wilson; Photo: David Cooper

An essay about August Wilson is up at The New Republic, as well as a link to the PBS American Masters documentary August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand, which aired recently to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Wilson’s death.

The economic hardship and systemic racism suffered by African Americans were hardly the only subjects Wilson tackled. Seven Guitars deals with black manhood. In King Hedley II, set in the 1990s, actors, such as future Oscar nominee Viola Davis, powerfully brought women’s reproductive choice into an African American arena. Wilson also delved into the paranormal in The Piano Lesson and Gem of the Ocean. In that way, the playwright perhaps helped us see aspects of our lives even we tried to erase.

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At The Guardian, Maddy Costa writes about the need for theatres to be less uptight about the behaviors and disruptions of their audiences, and examines how theatre culture could change if “relaxed” performances weren’t just one-off events:

A vital question was raised at the event: what might the theatre landscape look like if it were more relaxed, not occasionally, but all the time? Last summer, a Theatre Charter was proposed, detailing expected behaviour for the benefit of occasional theatregoers: no rustling sweet wrappers, no mobile phones, definitely no eating McDonald’s. How much more inviting might theatres feel if they didn’t just reject the snobbery embedded in such a charter, but offered a different manifesto, in which it was clear that all people – whatever their backgrounds, ages, physical or mental abilities – were welcome to see any performance, any day they wanted, together?

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Link Roundup! – 1/16/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Three new reports from the NEA were recently released and explore the relationship between arts and the economy and detail how audiences attend and participate in the arts. Check them out, data nerds!

NEA_Infographics_EconomicValue_small

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Everyday Feminism has a great post about what intersectionality means and why it’s so important. It’s a great tool for anyone wondering how to explain inclusive feminism and apply it day-to-day.

It makes sense in many ways that those of us with identity privilege would have a harder time including in our feminism those who are oppressed. Privilege conceals itself from those who have it, and it’s a lot easier to focus on the ways that we are marginalized or oppressed.

But without an intersectional lens, our movements cannot be truly anti-oppressive because it is not, in fact, possible to tease apart the oppressions that people are experiencing. Racism for women of color cannot be separated from their gendered oppression. A Trans person with a disability cannot choose which part of their identity is most in need of liberation.

Yet there is regularly confusion about what intersectionality really is.

intersectionality

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#StaffChat: Envisioning Boston’s Cultural Future

Staff Chat posts feature articles and news that the C1 team discusses as part of our weekly all-staff meeting. We’d love to hear your thoughts, too — hit us up here in the comments, or on Facebook and Twitter!

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While C1 was busy opening our Displaced Hindu Gods Trilogy by Aditi Kapil over the past few weeks, some exciting announcements about the state of Boston’s cultural community were released. The staff is reading a few articles this week to catch up on the news – check out the links below:

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“Seven Moon Junction” by Shinique Smith, the Greenway Wall in Dewey Square

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