Tag Archives: funding

Link Roundup! – 7/22/16

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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Jones and DeGroat: “What’s RACE got to do with it?” Photo: Peter Irby

Oregon Artswatch reports on a conversation about race and the arts held at Imago Theatre earlier this month:

The event was a conversation called “What’s RACE Got To Do With It?,” produced by the group The Color of NOW and hosted by Third Rail Repertory Theatre, which shares the Imago space. Part performance, part talk show and part back-and-forth with the audience, it included a monologue to an unborn child – a child who, given the state of the world and its racial volatility, would remain unborn, an idea derailed – by actor Joseph Gibson, and a little music from Ben Graves, and a long conversation about the nitty gritty of race in America and Oregon in particular with the actor, director, and activist Kevin Jones, artistic director of the August Wilson Red Door Project, an organization whose ambitious goal is to “change the racial ecology of Portland through the arts.” It’s a tall order, given the ratcheting of racial tensions across the nation and much of the rest of the world in recent times.

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Boston Globe has a feature about the city’s redevelopment efforts and how the arts are included in those plans:

First came Boston Creates, now comes Futurecity Massachusetts, a joint project of the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Boston Foundation that seeks to place arts and culture at the heart of redevelopment and revitalization efforts in the state’s three largest cities. The partnership, which is working with consultant Mark Davy’s London-based Futurecity, will focus on real estate projects in Boston’s Fenway Cultural District, the Springfield Central Cultural District, and Worcester’s Salisbury Cultural District. As these cultural districts undergo transformation, it’s essential to understand the various stages of real estate transactions. One important term you might encounter is ‘active under contract.’ Knowing what does active under contract mean can help you navigate the real estate market more effectively. This status indicates that a property is under contract with a buyer, but the seller is still accepting backup offers. Understanding such terms ensures you stay informed and prepared during your real estate ventures.

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Link Roundup! – 5/20/16

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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ARTS AND CULTURE CHIEF JULIA BURROS. / PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER CHURCHILL

Boston Magazine has a feature examining the ups and downs of the city’s cultural planning process to date:

But goals alone do not make a plan. Certainly, the effort was enormous, the aims lofty, the motives sincere. But let’s be blunt: The key issues were identified very early on in the process. It shouldn’t take more than a year of visioning exercises—at a cost of $1.4 million, almost the same as Burros’s fiscal year 2016 annual department budget of $1.7 million—to pinpoint challenges and strengths that have been evident in the arts community for years and years. Privately, people in the arts community have been wondering when all of those lofty goals will translate into action.

The answer wasn’t forthcoming when Burros presided over a town hall meeting at Bunker Hill Community College in March. Remember: The Boston Creates team had promised that the first draft of the actual plan would be released at this meeting. But Burros simply reiterated the five goals (which now include a specific focus on equity). No action items. No timeline. No metrics. No funding stream.

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This week’s Boston Globe also has an article looking at the funding details (or lack thereof) in the draft proposal of the cultural plan:

The authors write that Walsh has made “great strides” when it comes to arts funding, proposing a $2.3 million budget for the Office of Arts and Culture in fiscal year 2017. Nevertheless, they cede that the “possibility of further increases is severely limited. The city faces increasing fiscal pressure from different sources, including statutorily limited revenue tools, rising fixed costs, underfunding of charter school reimbursement, decreasing local aid, and the growing need for a wide range of city services.”

In other words, a push for dedicated arts funding in Boston — already a highly politicized venture as City Hall must sway state legislators — must also compete against other city needs, such as education, housing, and public safety.

Burros avoided discussing funding tactics, such as potential public-private partnerships, in detail last week, saying it was too early. “The creation of the plan and the implementation of the plan are really two different things,” she said, calling the draft a “milestone.” “When we’re at the final plan and we’re announcing implementation in June, there’ll be even more specifics.”

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Link Roundup! – 3/18/16

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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The Boston Globe has a piece about the Performing Arts Facilities Assessment, which is part of the Boston Creates plan:

Formally known as the Performing Arts Facilities Assessment, the online survey is part of a broader facilities study the mayor announced last November following a series of rapid-fire shifts in the city’s performing arts landscape involving the Colonial Theatre, Citi Performing Arts Center, and BU Theatre. Calling the survey an “essential component” of that broader study, city officials said it would allow them to hear directly from Boston’s performing arts community — both performers and those who provide performance and rehearsal venues.

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HowlRound has a post by the Latina/o Theatre Commons about cultural microaggressions in arts reviews:

Unintentional or not, cultural microaggressions in reviews should be called out and examined for the harm they cause to a cultural community and to the field of theatrical criticism. Michael Sommers’ musing that Ropes has “no Latino flavor or content” is part of a larger pattern seen in American theatre criticism in which the reviewer imposes their own mistaken expectations onto an artist of color (see the highlighted sections in: Jeffrey Gantz on Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them by A. Rey Pamatmat, Charles Isherwood on Mala Hierba by Tanya Saracho and Destiny of Desire by Karen Zacarías, and Charles McNulty on Lydia by Octavio Solis). Such reviews suggest that, for instance, playwrights can only write about culturally specific issues or have characters that fit into the reviewer’s assumptions about that cultural community, of which they are not a part.

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Link Roundup! – 3/4/16

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 has an Opinion piece is the Boston Globe this week:

If Boston is going to be a thriving, healthy, and innovative city, we need our artists to flourish. Artists can help solve big problems and heal old wounds. Artists embody the creativity that fuels innovation, and innovation is part of the fabric of Boston. Their work expresses our histories and our values. It communicates our fears, hopes, and dreams. Art brings people together. We see this in the crowds that gathered around the Echelman sculpture on the Greenway last summer, in Illuminus at Fenway, where percussionists “played” the Green Monster, and in our neighborhood festivals and parades. From the beginning of this administration, we identified the arts as a top priority. And we recognized that supporting the arts begins with supporting artists’ work. Without our artists, we aren’t Boston.

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American Theatre has a feature about the Write With Us program at Soho Rep, which allows the public to come in for writing workshops led by Soho Rep playwrights:

Martin and Benson invited the participating writers—which also included Annie Baker, Greg Moss, and Daniel Alexander Jones—to format their three-hour workshop however they wanted. César Alvarez had attendees write lyrics, to which he would compose a melody and start to craft a song, while Anne Washburn conducted her entire workshop in the dark and had students bring flashlights. “It was this very sort of sonic experience,” says Benson, who attended all of the writer’s workshops.

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Link Roundup! – 2/19/16

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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Pep Montserrat for The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe has a feature on Boston’s new artist-in-residence program:

Imagine a dancer working with police officers to better interpret a suspect’s gait. Or a musician teaching a city parking clerk how to listen deeply. Or an abstract painter rearranging a tangle of contradictory street signs. That’s the idea behind Boston’s new artist-in-residence program, which will embed local artists inside city departments to promote creative thinking about municipal government.

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StageSource Executive Director (and recent C1 PlayLab guest speaker!) Julie Hennrikus wrote an editorial for the ARTery about arts space and funding in Boston:

We are in the midst of a social revolution right now, and cultural equity is part of it. Cultural equity requires acknowledging, addressing and dismantling the systemic and social inequities that are built into the fabric of our society. We can’t achieve what is possible unless we acknowledge that even in the arts, which are supposed to be a great equalizer, inequity persists.

Do we really care about cultural equity? That is an important conversation, and speaks to Boston’s history and its future. We have to care. The arts community has the opportunity to be a leader on this front in a way that would change the city. Could different funding streams help? When companies rely on ticket sales to the degree that they do in Boston, fear of change becomes ingrained. Rethinking offerings, audiences, locations, art forms — all of that requires change.

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Link Roundup! – 2/5/16

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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Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

The Atlantic has an article exploring the history and future of the National Endowment for the Arts as it approaches its 50th anniversary:

Fifty years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts was created to address just such inequity. On September 29, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Endowment for the Arts into existence, along with a suite of other ambitious social programs, all under the rubric of the Great Society. Johnson imagined these programs as ways to serve “not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”

Half a century later, the ethos upon which the NEA was founded—inclusion and community—has been eroded by consistent political attack. As the NEA’s budget has been slashed, private donors and foundations have jumped in to fill the gap, but the institutions they support, and that receive the bulk of arts funding in this country, aren’t reaching the people the NEA was founded to help serve. The arts aren’t dead, but the system by which they are funded is increasingly becoming as unequal as America itself.

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Jack Reuler, Artistic Director of Mixed Blood Theatre in MN, lists 111 Nuggets for Being a Successful and Ethical Artistic Director on HowlRound:

Years ago a St. Paul kindergartener named Reuler was asked to demonstrate that he could count. As he got into three digits, he counted one hundred eight, one hundred nine, eleventy, eleventy-one… at which time he was stopped by his teacher and corrected, being told that it is, correctly, one hundred ten and one hundred eleven. The five-year-old responded “If 81 is eighty-one and 91 is ninety-one, then 111 is eleventy-one!” and held his ground. While that may have, in another time, led to a diagnosis of oppositional defiance disorder, that young contrarian became determined to live a life in which things aren’t always what they appear to be or what others name them to be. My fascination with the symmetry of numbers remains to this day and so having 111 (eleventy-one) nuggets that I have gleaned through decades of leading a regional theatre in America will, hopefully, save years of discovery through trial and error for new artistic directors.

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Link Roundup! – 12/18/15

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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Lester Hellman Shamos, Megan Cramer, Martin McWatters, Lena Hellman, and Lindsay Torrey at SPACE on Ryder Farm in Brewster, N.Y. (Photo by Talya Chalef)

American Theatre has a piece about companies that are including amenities for work/life balance, like on-site child care, into their operations:

Creating a supportive work enviornment can address both old dilemmas and new social realities. Jobs in the nonprofit theatre can be less lucrative than jobs in other sectors, observes Amanda White Thietje, managing director of Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theatre. At Mixed Blood, she says, “The salaries do not match the corporate headquarters nearby.” So it behooves the company to consider, as she puts it, “What are the ways we make sure [employees] feel rested and appreciated and have time with their families?” Such a strategy can have the added bonus of cutting down on employee turnover, which is expensive and disruptive for a company, she notes.

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The Boston Globe highlighted the recent NEA grant awards, including the one Company One received for a new Kris Diaz project:

The piece, using the rivalry between the Celtics legend and Wilt Chamberlain to highlight issues of race, class, and segregation in Boston, was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as one of a series of plays addressing US history.

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Link Roundup! – 8/14/15

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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The Nonprofit with Balls blog has a post on what he calls “The Nonprofit Hunger Games”:

We become biased toward those who survive: In the Hunger Games, the youngest kids, the sweetest, kindest ones, are usually the first to get killed. Everyone bets against them. In the Nonprofit Hunger Games, funders bet on which nonprofits are the most “sustainable” and invest in those organizations. Instead of holistically looking at problems and systems, society just funds those organizations we think will be strongest and most likely to survive. And since we fund these more “sustainable” organizations, then of course these organizations are likelier to survive, while the smaller, “weaker” organizations (often led by marginalized communities) are left to struggle. We start to believe that those organizations that survive deserve it, that those who fail also deserve it. But simply because a nonprofit is good at surviving, it does not necessarily mean that it is most effective at solving community problems.

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Phil Weaver-Stoesz’s essay on HowlRound about delegating tasks has some great reminders for us busy theatre folks:

As artists, we are trained to be recklessly optimistic about how much we can handle. We’re fast learners, we love our art, and we have something big to say, so what can go wrong? We approach the world with laptops in hand, ready to create. The problem is, we burn out. We enter the process full of passion, but halfway through we peeter out in a train wreck of procrastination, fear and self-doubt. I call it, the “Puppydog Black Hole” problem.

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Link Roundup! – 3/27/15

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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Peter Friedman, Danny McCarthy, Michael Countryman, Hannah Bos and Carolyn McCormick in “The Open House” by Will Eno at Signature Theatre. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

In American Theatre, Issac Butler writes about several contemporary playwrights who are taking the traditional realistic living room family drama and turning it on its head:

In the current crop of anti-realist plays are Eno’s The Open House and Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, both mounted last season at New York City’s Signature Theater, and Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, a recent critical success at the Public Theater. Next season, Taylor Mac’s Hir will have its East Coast debut at Playwrights Horizons. All these plays simultaneously deploy and subvert various tropes of the genre: difficult fathers, family secrets, eccentric mothers, a compressed time scheme, money worries—and, well, white people.

They’re also all set in and around living rooms, the most common and persistent setting in contemporary American theatre.

While it can be frustrating to walk into a theatre and see yet another couch in front of yet another television three feet away from yet another cluttered bookshelf, the ubiquity of this setting isn’t hard to understand. After all, the living room’s history and linguistic roots intersect with American theatre’s primary concerns. “Living room” is simply the American term for the parlor, whose name derives from the French parler, to talk. It is figuratively, then, a space for talking. Parlors are also a middle-class (or, if you must, bourgeois) invention, much like the theatres that regularly reproduce them onstage.

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Jason Tseng, the Community Engagement Specialist at Fractured Atlas, has a compelling essay up at Medium about LA’s 99-seat Theatre Plan and the issue of funding for small companies:

The top 3% of arts organizations by budget size ($10M and above) received 60% of all arts and culture funding. Conversely, the bottom half of organizations by budget size ($100k and below) received only 5% of that funding.

Not only is this deeply problematic from a purely class perspective, Holly also notes that this wealth gap disproportionately effects racial and ethnic minority communities, as well as other oppressed groups. This phenomenon is also not limited to the U.S. In fact, a similar report out of Britain cautioned that drastic changes to arts funding need to occur in order to avoid a “cultural apartheid.”

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MASSCreative: Arts Funding Slashed by 50%

A proposed budget by the Massachusetts House Ways and Means Committee recommends cutting the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s budget from $11.1 million to $5 million in the next fiscal year. Read the article here and reach out to your local representatives to tell him/her to support Rep. Cory Atkins’ proposed $16 million budget for the Massachusetts Arts Council instead.