A breadcrumb trail of conversation (from Twitter to Flux Theatre to Stolen Chair) led me to Stolen Chair Theatre’s new initiative to support new works. Instead of grants and traditional subscriptions, they propose a community support system modeled on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Says Stolen Chair:
Like the CSA model, Stolen Chair hopes to build a membership community,
a “CST”, which would provide ‘seed’ money for the company’s development
process and then reap a year’s worth of theatrical harvests.
The organization has received a grant to create the model as part of The Field’s Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists (ERPA) initiative. More on the model and the metaphor in a future post. But in the meanwhile, I was struck by an extended quote from Stolen Chair’s Jon Stancato (transcribed in his blog), which seems to suggest the motivation for their CSA idea:
There is no such thing as an arts economy since non-commercial arts by their very definition don’t follow market logic and can’t compete in the market place without dependence on non-profit support structures and the government. So we can embrace our role in the margins of the economy and struggle the way that performing artists have struggled since theatre and religion parted ways, or we can model ourselves on the only other two positions left to us in a market-driven economy: as charity (quite like an endangered species) or as community resource (like a neighborhood garden)….
I don’t want to be a charity, in large part because I don’t think our social cause has enough merit to compete with other charities who actually change lives on a grand scale. So, the only round hole we can force our square peg of a “business model” into is as community resource.
In this interconnected, digital age, if our art can serve as a meeting place for communities of like-minded individuals to connect, celebrate, and be challenged, then we might find a way of restoring theatre’s primacy in people’s lives and creating sustainable theatre-making organisms (not organizations).
For which he received both boos and applause. While I would nudge Stancato’s definition of an economy, which seems to assume an exclusively commercial marketplace (which is only part of an economy), I think his central question is a rather important one:
Is unprofitable theater (or other arts endeavor) a charity, a community resource, an entitlement, a labor of love, or some combination thereof? Whatever we choose as our cluster of definitions, it will be helpful to align our business models and our resource strategies accordingly.
It will be fascinating to watch Stolen Chair, and the other recipients of the ERPA funding, explore these new alignments.
Thanks, Andrew, for picking up this story. If you’re looking for more content detailing the proposal, here is video and audio from my presentation at WNYC last month. A podcast from NYtheatrecast should be coming out by early November and our mini-site, http://communitysupportedtheatre.org should be live with real content (instead of the skeleton there now) within a week or so.
I think you’re right to define the options open to “unprofitable theatre” so broadly. I think my feelings regarding how Stolen Chair has chosen to align our particular business model might shift significantly if we lived in a country were arts where perceived as more of a national entitlement.
And I totally understand your nudging about my working definition of “economy.” (Actually, I am quite a big fan of the framework proposed by Lewis Hyde in “The Gift”.) The copy you pulled from my blog was a speech at the New Economy Smackdown where my “soapbox manifesto” needed to come in under 2 minutes, so I was trying to work with a shorthand that was, as you noted, more than a little reductive.
Looking forward to further conversations about this!
Best,
Jon & the Chairs
PS-You can follow us on Twitter @StolenChairTC.
PPS-Oh, and if anyone thinks they might enjoy being part of this experiment in arts funding, we’re looking for charter members for our pilot season, including a small group of booster members who will “pay-what-they-think-is-fair” and help recruit other members. Email us at cst[at]stolenchair.org.
If we do our history research right, I think we will find that the arts started out as community projects. There were patrons that funded the art productions and they served to lose just as much (if not more) as the artist if the production was not successful. It is interesting how the arts seem to be traveling in a full circle, both management wise and audience development wise.
Great conversation starter – thank you for posting!
Shoshana Fanizza
Audience Development Specialists
Here in the UK we’ve been talking about this as a theoretical possibility – and it’s great to see someone actually doing it. So I, and many others, will follow this story with a great deal of interest.
Thank you for fueling the discussion of new business models for nonprofits, Andrew! We need as much creative exploration in this realm as possible. The Center for the Future of Museums has been pushing the issue as well:
http://bit.ly/3XWk8f
I like the idea of strategically positioning cultural organizations as community resources (sending the message to a supporter that “this is something that benefits you) rather than charities (something that benefits some other less fortunate chap.) Functionally, I think many nonprofits already use a CSA-type economic model. We bundle and pre-sell as membership/subscriptions/season-passes goods that would otherwise be purchased at time of use (tickets/admission.)
Andrew – thanks for sharing this. Reminds me of perhaps an extreme version of this concept I learned about a few years ago. I attended a conference on Culture and Sustainable Development in Italy sponsored by the World Bank and Unesco, and there was a presentation by the Italian artistic director of a “pan-European” theatre company. They decided they wanted to find a way to be connected in a much more elemental way to the community. To find this connection they literally travelled to a remote South American village – I believe in Brazil – and set themselves the task of making theatre that would be relevant to these people, that they would value highly enough to “pay for” through barter. They essentially set themselves up with a “succeed or starve to death” scenario because this was the only way they had to survive – making art the only thing they had to “sell” (or trade). In the end they did succeed, and built an incredibly powerful bond with the villagers. Fascinating story!
THANK YOU! It’s a huge delight to see Stolen Chair and the whole ERPA project on your blog Andrew. I am a huge fan of your writing.
To add to the “new business models” discussion, the thing that is vital to ERPA (and that Stolen Chair does extraordinarily well!) is a one-to-one tie between the art and the business. It isn’t a simple “let’s make mugs and sell them at our shows” (which is fine too!) but it is “who are we, what do we believe in, what do we do well, is there a sustainable revenue stream in here somewhere that we can mine?” These are tougher questions to ask, and all the ERPA artists are responding to these questions thoughtfully and strategically.
We look forward to following their progress too AND to getting their projects out to the wider arts economy too so that other artists can beg, borrow and steal from them.
Jennifer Wright Cook
Executive Director, The Field
I just wanted to point out that the reason that most western classical music, ballet, and theatre organizations bear the name of their own cities surely indicates that (in North America) when they were established, they were the groups whose performers came out of the community and went back to the community in performance -no matter what the origin and date of the work presented. In spite of how classical arts are marketed and sold, there is still a disconnect now between “my place” the classical arts and their organizations, which is possibly that old ongoing problem related to the arts cycle being broken – developing audiences, school arts education, private classes/lessons, and amateur arts community options.
Hello Andrew,
I appreciate this post. Evaluating arts organizations in relation to charities and community resources is important, as those two avenues do reflect the flow of funds.
I work for the Zootown Arts Community Center (ZACC) in Missoula, MT, where three tenets define our mission. We are committed to being:
• An educational arts organization;
• An economic and artistic resource for working artists;
• A safe, creative community center.
By focusing on community, our arts center, opened during a failing economy in August 2008, has seen unprecedented support for arts as an experience, rather than a product. We have traditional components (such as a gallery) and nontraditional artistic options (all-ages music shows and a community print lab with silk-screening and block press options). By promoting and engaging our patrons in a two-way experience of fine art, the ZACC has succeeded in making art accessible to Missoulians.
Thankfully, Missoula is a city where residents value art. However, this is a double-edged sword; time invested does not necessarily equate to dollars in the door. We are committed to launching artists on professional careers and providing resources such as exhibition space and career training. Combining this with do-it-yourself opportunities for patrons bridges the gap between arts and community.
All of this is to say that the community resource model does work. The Zootown Arts Community Center used this as the central principle, and it has opened many, many doors for us. It is the axle which keeps our creative wheel turning and the Center’s momentum building.
Best,
Erin McPeck
AmeriCorps*VISTA
Zootown Arts Community Center