ARTIST ECONOMIES, A TRUST BROKEN
Festival Statement
Fire! New Play Festival 2009
Once after I mistakenly mixed up a character's occupation, a playwright asked me four months into their residency and with a not well-hidden hint of distrust: Have you read my play yet?
I am not trying to front though I got a little tight! Yes, I had read their play. And in fact I had read all drafts passed on to me and, like most playwrights that come through the Train, I had seen their previous work.
So you probably have a picture of said producer blowing up Hollywood style. Wrong. Actually, I understood where they were coming from and (with as much pride as I could muster) I responded coolly to what I felt was misplaced distrust.
I also knew that I had to take the lead in nipping this bad energy in the bud. How come?
I knew this person's story -- a story not too uncommon for artists today. This playwright once told me that they had a play presented by a local festival and at one point they picked up that the producers had not read their play. Ever since then, producers have been suspect in this writer’s eyes: Do I really have a home here, the playwright asks. Do they believe in the spirit of this work and what it's saying about our world? Oh snap, I'm being pimped!
I also knew the producer artist's story too. You've heard the tune before: in the context of little to no art funding, especially artistic development work, producers are forced to cut corners and costs and just present work (advertising budget, but no press work; performance space funding, but no monies for rehearsal space) – often with no time themselves to form deeper relationships with the very artists they are inspired by. The real story is that these producers are not always out to make a quick buck; many are driven by a sense of personal nobility to put these stories on stage. Ok, well most of the time at least.
So with this context in front of me I didn't feel the need to READ -- as my fabulously queer roommate says -- this artist. And I don't blame them either. There have been times, when that hint of distrust creeps in me too. Like when a rehearsal is missed or folks come late or question me in ways that I know they wouldn't question a white straight male producer, I ask myself the same questions.
What concerns this statement is not that these experiences are isolated, but they are in fact symptomatic of larger forces at work.
Since the economy began to tank in 2006, it has been my experience that the artist hustler, the artist sharer, the artist collaborator have been overextended, undervalued, and fed up with it all. It is an all too common story, so much so that when I took time out to write this statement and focused in on the magnitude of the state of the artist, a little death happened inside my artist heart. I’m left with this:
The artist's trust in our self-made economies has been broken and in urgent need of repair.
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We are in extraordinary economic times.
But for many folks, capitalism's wrath has always been felt. Last month, at an Offstage Forum, the artist/community dialogues Freedom Train Productions organizes and facilitates, Resident Playwright Patricia Ione Lloyd said it best when she said: I don't have much, but now [the elite] don't have anything either.
Amen, sista.
We are living in a time with some of the greatest levels of disparity in history. While some folks have begun to experience the fear of the lost of their wealth, we have an exponentially growing number of folks who face insurmountable barriers to accessing basic dignity. Like for example, the domestic workers in New York who appealed to the state senate for a worker bill of rights this summer. An appropriate case in point given our development of Ione's Dirty Little Black Girls.
Yes, folks are demanding accountability from the state, but we have never put all our eggs in one basket.
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Artist Economies: Surviving & Thriving
You have the actor hustler who works day gigs and performs at night. You have the bartering producer artist who cleans up a theater space to rehearse there for free. And as my best friend and die-hard feminist would say, you have the collabo-ho: the artist that brings together all their art-making friends to join forces on the project of the year -- sometimes on a shoe string budget.
We are creative and determined people who have always been able to make it happen with or without the Benjamins.
But are artist economies bottomless wells?
My experience since the recession started to hit in 2006 and 2007 has led me to the understanding that our producing, resident, and collaborating artists think otherwise.
Producers at Freedom Train Productions have held conversations with all festival actors, playwrights, and directors around the economic crisis and how it's affecting their art/work. In holding these group chats our goals have been to, one, have their stories inform our 2010 budget planning; two, share with the artists, actors especially, that we are building toward a living-wage future; and three, reaffirm our commitment as producers to maintaining our current level of political theatre work during the global economic crisis.
In the conversation that I facilitated, I jumped it off with telling my own story of losing my day gig because of recession lay offs. Actors quickly felt comfortable sharing their stories, including one actor who barters for gym time and rehearsal space and another artist who observed less auditions and less opportunities compared to this time last year.
Granted, artists know how to hustle. We know how to collab. We know how to make it happen. These stories speak to the lived experiences of artist economies.
But my sense of the situation is that there is a bottom to the well and we could very well be about to suck the last drop of water out of it.
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Another world is possible.
In April I was invited to speak on a panel at Brown University's Black Lavender Experience which convened black queer theatre artists, writers, producers, and students from across the country. One of the other panels included Daniel Alexander Jones, a friend, phenomenal playwright, and an adviser to Freedom Train Productions. In his remarks he gave voice to the artist economy that has sustained him through the years.
Daniel asked all of the panel attendants to look at the person next to them. Study their face, eyes, and breath. With each of our eye's interlocked on and studying our neighbor, we went on a journey through Daniel's artistic upbringing. He began with his time spent as an undervalued student of color within his undergraduate's theater program. It was there, he shared, a professor told him that he would never be cast in a full production (with the clear intimation that this had nothing to do with his talent) and you have to be cast in a full production to graduate so he might as well drop out of the program.
Damn. But of course as folks who know Daniel -- and his wicked Jomama Jones political theater drag personality, his New Dramatists Residency, and his Assistant Professorship at Fordham University -- we knew he would get the last laugh.
As this meditation continued, Daniel listed off all the people, artists, mentors, friends who would come after this professor. Always with no expectation of being paid, but just out of a pure desire to help Daniel find his artist heart - and to continue a tradition.
During the final silent moments of this exercise, eyes still locked on my neighbor, I had time to revisit my own journey...
What if Sharon Bridgforth had never offered that community workshop in Austin when she got that grant which inspired me to write WRITE
W R I T E? Would I have ever picked up a spirit to create space for writers in the community? Would our open workshop have ever come to fruition? Would Resident Playwright Ayanna Maia have ever hooked up with us had it not been for the open workshop she initially took last summer? Would she had been ever commissioned to write the new representations of black women -- voluptuous, shape shifters, not defined by your box -- that Woman to Woman has brought to FIRE! New Play Festival 2009?
Would we have created a space when in one recent offstage forum, a participant offered memories of his deceased partner to the room and Resident Playwright Derek Lee McPhatter whose new work Bring the Beat Back was centered around a people in some ways also in struggle with the memory and death of an important figure in their family and community -- a fact that this participant could not have yet known?
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There are larger forces at work here.
This statement does not fully address the powerful structures that have dramatically strained artist economies. While I am not under the belief that artists are not equipped to be located within the leadership of offstage struggles, I am fine with putting out some thoughts in the universe and have folks chew, bounce back, and challenge.
See you at FIRE!
- Andre Lancaster
Andre is a producer artist and Artistic & Managing Director at Freedom Train Productions. FIRE! New Play Festival 2009 and its black queer-inspired political theatre movement opens August 5th in Fort Greene's BAM Cultural District.
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