the urgent artist

A report out from barrish, curation #1:
Amy Schiller and Helen Frank

The A.O. Movement Collective’s 2011/2012 season has officially LAUNCHED!  We announced a sneak preview of our season this past Saturday, joined by a fantastic crowd of supporters, presenters, and curators.  The trailer from the first curation and our season announcement will launch to the public tomorrow (are you excited yet? get excited!), but  before we post the new season, I wanted to take a moment to report out about the first curation, and convey how excited we are about this new work and corresponding MENU project.

The performance itself was an incredible event.  After our fifteen exclusive guests arrived in Amy’s apartment, they were ushered out on to Amy’s balcony which overlooked the parking lot, dancers below already in motion.  From there, the dancers traveled up into the living room, moved through the apartment, and led the audience up through the stairwell to end on the roof.  The show was both intimate and surreal, and the use of Amy’s apartment as our performance space opened up all sorts of new ideas for us about the assumed safety of internal and domestic space, voyeurism, intimacy, and the dancers’ relationships to the audience.  I’m excited to launch the trailer tomorrow – the differences between our first trailer and the new one already point to how unique each curation is going to be.  As we launched into this first curation there was much still unknown about how the project and system would function; nonetheless, this curation gave us a first glimpse in microcosm of what we hope the whole project will become.

As a two-year endeavor, barrish signifies a new way of working for the AOMC both artistically and economically, and is exciting in part because it’s the most holistic fusing of the two that we’ve been able to achieve to date. Perhaps most exciting, the project WORKS.  The AOMC has been interested in sustainability for a while now, and been experimenting with new models and structures along the way.  One thing we’ve learned is that even when the system is built soundly and intelligently and should work, without a buy-in and participatory interest from its audience, it will fall flat.  That’s why we’re so excited by this project – not only is interest spreading like wildfire, but the system is proving itself to be functional: marketable, sustainable, and effective beyond belief.

Here’s where the project gets radical: in just two months, the MENU project took us from having never met our first curators Amy and Helen, to having them be major supporters of our work – not only in terms of their specific curation, but of the AOMC’s work as a whole, joining our family of support as ambassadors of our project and mission.  A two month turnaround for that type of involvement is rare, to say the least.  One of the most important things i try to impart to clients about fundraising and building support networks (and really all other business too – social media is a prime example) is that it doesn’t happen overnight – it’s all about building real relationships, no matter what tools you’re using, and that takes a surprising amount of investment and time.  The fact that we were able to accomplish in two months what has previously taken us four years is not to say that those donors on the four-year track aren’t worth it or aren’t as exciting – everyone has their own style, desired levels of involvement, and provides a different kind of support.   I also don’t mean to infer that because of this one curation, Amy and Helen are now expected to be major financial supporters or locked to us for life; their support as curators of this one event is major in and of itself.  However, its exciting to us because it signifies a new possible system – a way to develop a dance’s art and economy holistically at the same time.

From the get-go, Amy and Helen were directly involved in the creative process.  Not only were they asked to be involved in deciding what sections we’d be showing by talking about what struck them as interesting, what they’d like to see developed, what they didn’t like, what they thought would speak to their audience, etc. but they were also allowed to make decisions that we wouldn’t make.  For instance, one of Helen’s concerns was that the whole piece have music.  As someone who often opts for silence, this provision – at first challenging and intimidating – turned out to be exactly what the piece needed.  Even if we don’t end up keeping the music for every moment of the piece, that decision spurred an entirely new (and exceedingly fantastic) score by composer Theo Wilson.  Likewise, even decisions that most likely won’t be kept through the final work (for example, having no spoken lines) were helpful in vetting our decisions and questioning our assumptions.  I am not often one to relinquish artistic control of my work, but I am beginning to understand how helpful it can be to force yourself into working with decisions that aren’t yours.  Not only are you given the freedom of trying the directive without it being your decision, but it’s impossible to come out of the situation with less information than you started with.  Worst case scenario you know with more certainty why you’re making a specific decision, best case it leads you to something you’d never have been able to find on your own.  I was also entirely thrilled that Amy and Helen, individuals creatively involved in the arts, but not creating their own works, felt like they were getting an opportunity to be artists – investigating their own aesthetic and content-driven questions through the work at hand.  By the end of our work together the level of dialogue going on with both ladies about content, form, audience engagement, and more was incredible.

While Amy and Helen were directly involved in the artistic discussions surrounding their curation, they were equally involved in the economic ones.  From the beginning they were presented with the reasoning and logic behind decisions, rather than just getting the simple fact.  For example, they were not only given the fact that a basic curation is $200 and more adding X sections costs X amount, but took part in a conversation with us about what the $200 specifically covered – dancer salaries, staff stipends, rehearsal space, marketing.  They were also asked to consider their options about how to fun this work as part of our dialogue together: did they want to charge a cover charge? ask for donations? absorb the cost themselves?  Though it was hard, we resisted the temptation to do it all just out of love and excitement for the work, and held both the curators and ourselves to making sure the fee we charged for the curation would cover all the expense and leave us at zero.  By the end of the process, Amy and Helen were asking economic questions on-point enough to make a business-minded arts consultant like myself blush: do you want to invite some of your major VIPs? What are your funding credits?  What’s your annual budget?  How does this work?

Because Amy and Helen were involved on both sides of the spectrum, and asked to be aware of all the economic and artistic concerns if not directly involved, the relationship proved extremely fruitful.  In just two months, we were able to facilitate an experience that not only provided a radical intimacy with the work, but a substantial knowledge of the dancemaking process in entirety.  In opting out of a more traditional artist/presenter interaction, we were able to instead build exciting and nuanced relationships with two amazing women who are articulate, adventurous, intelligent, and genuinely excited about the work – exactly the type of supporters you want on your side.  These ladies jumped in with voracious heads and hearts, and were true partners in the work’s development.  I have very rarely felt as supported as I did by these ladies by a traditional curator. Not only that, but the process introduced us to a whole new audience – 15 distinct opportunities to introduce a new human (complete with new eyes, questions, ideas!) to our work. When I first started choreographing I remember coming across a story related by Mark Morris about the impact of the first time he realized there were audience members present who weren’t family members or friends.  Getting new people to the work – and to the entire community – is a major challenge in our field.  Though 15 people might seem small to some, in a form of art where an average audience is somewhere between 40 and 200, 15 is a substantial (and, when you consider the amount of curations we’re doing, quickly multiplying) number.  If even one of those fifteen audience members comes to see a future show, I will consider it a major victory.

So, without patting ourselves on the back too much (because lord knows there’s infinitely more work to be done) let me just come out and say it: this system is radical. It’s a totally new way of working, and it works.

In my five years or so as a young choreographer, I have never experienced a system that offers so much support to all parties involved. In just two months we were able to cultivate an amazing relationship with two new major supporters, reach fifteen new audience members in an impactful way, develop the work in process in ways that we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish alone, and perform it in a way that left us with great photos and videos to use in future marketing.  Moreover, we were able to do it in a way that didn’t overtax our human resources and was fully funded, coming out of the curation with a beautifully balanced budget.  And while our full season budget has increased about 25% from last year’s (which frankly I would expect – we’re a growing company!) our earned income via the curations has more than DOUBLED.  Wow.

I don’t mean to sound cocky or overly optimistic (geez – you know you’re dealing with the dance world when you feel like you have to apologize for having an economically sound working arrangement!), but I can’t deny how excited I am about this new model.  It’s not even about this specific model – it’s the knowledge that sustainability is possible, is functional, is available to us as choreographers and art-makers if we set out to create it. In the current arts economy I think it’s easy to feel like poverty and burnout are our only eventual options – after all, where are our examples of sustainable systems, artists, and organizations?  There’s certainly more work to be done (with this specific project, with the AOMC’s work, with the arts economy as a whole!) but this system and the success of its first curation have me excited – dare i say feeling hopefull? – for our future artmaking.

I’m looking forward to our upcoming season (which we’ll announce to the public tomorrow!), and can already tell that each one is going to be totally unique – unveiling new and evolving possibilities for use of the MENU project as we go forward.  We’d love to hear your thoughts and respond to any questions you might have about the project/process – please feel free to comment below!

Tags: Amy Schiller, arts business, barrish, business, business models for the arts, dance funding, Helen Frank, report out, sustainability, the A.O. Movement Collective, the MENU project