If you are a performing artist, I’ll bet that, like me, you feel beaten up, beaten down, slammed against many walls. You are likely searching for hope, but feeling that any kind of sustainable life in the arts is a faraway fantasy, only possible during better times. And weren’t these supposed to be the “better times”? Didn’t we all just dig ourselves out of the COVID ashes and start taking full breaths again?
It feels like death. No: It is death. The National Endowment for the Arts is being threatened, and in response is bleeding its grantees dry. New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project and National Theater Project are on their last legs. MAP Fund, as a granting organization, has already died.
A recent New Yorker article tracked the challenges arts organizations face as foundations restructure their funding strategies, prioritizing targeted, invitation-only models that focus on individual artists. That story left me asking: What about us, the dance artists at the end of the food chain? What are we supposed to do as we witness program after program dissolve? Yes, we can advocate. We can and should take collective action. But what should we really do if we aren’t part of the (less than) 1 percent of significantly funded artists? Where do we turn?
I feel breathless writing this. Because, honestly, it’s about so much more than money.
As a repeat recipient of MAP Fund and NDP grants, I can attest that the value of these awards starts with money but extends far beyond. As a grantee, your work gains important visibility. You become part of a community. You are able to weather more storms—the ones that make you doubt your work—because you know someone believed in your vision. Wearing these brands is also often the only way to open doors to other funders and presenters. Without them, we are mostly left with nomination-only awards, in which we have no say. Or we’re advised to focus our “funding strategies” on individual donors, a population that will surely be strained as organizations scramble to fill the wider and wider gaps.
The unhealthiness of it all is what really gets me down. It’s not just, “Oh, this is a rough moment, but we need to stop complaining and get back up and fight.” I mean, we will—because, as artists, that’s what we do. But the enduring toll on our mental, emotional, and artistic health runs deep. I personally feel plunged into an arena I don’t recognize. The remnants of the darkest COVID days might never leave us, but that was more of a “natural” disaster. These explicitly man-made ones feel more overwhelming, more dire, more difficult to crisis-manage.
Before I made my first dance, I worked in philanthropy, so I am not a stranger to the complex layers informing foundation decision-making, and I trust that their choices are defined by purpose and hope. I also know I am not alone in recognizing that narrowing funding to serve only a small population of outstanding artists will threaten the livelihoods of many others. My plea to the institutions who are creating new funding realities is to recognize that the trauma of our times surfaces in our art in important ways. Our work helps us illuminate deeply distressing elements in our society, helps us better understand and navigate them. But if we are constantly grappling with extreme uncertainty, our life force will drain out.
As I wrote in my 2021 article “It’s Time to Reimagine Dance Funding,” “there’s the dangerous myth that living on the edge leads to cutting-edge work. In truth, scarcity only breeds burnout. The edge is not something to be literally teetering on, but something we should be developing in our work.” And right now, living on the edge is turning into free fall.
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