IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Announcement of Episode 3 for Are You For Sale? Background is an image of what is referred to as the United States capitol building located on Piscataway Nacotchtank Land (Washington DC). The building in the image has been cropped so that the middle top tier of the building is askew.. The image is treated with a blue-yellow filter. Left top corner of the image is the podcast logo which reads “ARE YOU FOR SALE?” in white text. Logo features a small white microphone with a dollar sign on it. The logo is framed by two small white lined boxes. In the middle of the image is a banner of white text that reads “Episode 3: Tax Funded Smut Here! Government Funding Woes.” and an additional banner near the bottom reads “featuring Clare Croft and Sharon Musher”
EPISODE 3: Tax Funded Smut Here! Government Funding Woes.
In the first of two episodes about government funding, Miguel offers various ways that dance and performance received “public” money, including some sources that may surprise you. Guests include Sharon Ann Musher, author of Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture, and Clare Croft, author of Dancers As Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange.
Episode 3 Transcription
[Music Strumming]
Voice 1 (Edgar Villanueva)
Philanthropy as a sector exists because of capitalism and the accumulation of wealth in the first place…
Voice 2 (Stephanie Acosta)
There is no such thing as making wealth that isn’t part of a community…
Voice 3 (Karen Finley)
Why I was so committed to non-profits or NEA or funding for the arts is because then people do not have to be dependent on only the wealthy...
Voice 4 (Sara Juli)
It’s still at the end of the day, you fighting for your work, which... we fight for our work in all sorts of other ways
MIGUEL
[Sung with playful music] Art and money and dance and money and what is the right thing to do with that? When the system's so fucked up, [gets louder and harmonizes] are you for sale?
MIGUEL
Hello and welcome to Are You For Sale? a podcast about the ethical entanglements between money and performance making. I’m Miguel Gutierrez and yes, I take full responsibility for asking you to go on this ride with me. You are listening to Episode 3, so thank you for joining me. This episode’s a little longer than previous ones (Miguel Aside whispers: It’s a lot longer) because we’re starting to really get into the thick of it! Feel free to go back to Episodes 1 and 2 if you haven’t listened to them yet...because there is some order to this chaos. (Miguel Aside: I promise!) Also please note that at about the 15 minute mark, this episode contains a single reference to race that may be triggering.
A few years ago, as I was cooking breakfast, I was listening to the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC as I often do, (Brian Lehrer show theme music) and there was a segment that morning about the newly imposed ticket prices for out of town tourists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Brian’s guest for the segment was the art critic Jerry Saltz, who was criticizing the new policy as too expensive and a bad look for the museum. Brian Lehrer asked him, Well then where should this money come from, the government? And somewhere in between making scrambled eggs and putting the almond milk in my coffee, (Miguel Aside: delicioso!) my attention was piqued when I heard Jerry’s response:
JERRY SALTZ
“I'd like to say that many people think government should fund American museums more than they do. This is the case in Europe. However, I cannot imagine wanting our government, frankly, involved with our museums. Imagine Paul Ryan having to decide which exhibitions pass muster, or Mitch McConnell. I'm happy with the Met having, and other museums having to pay their way and I understand it's very difficult, but this seems the wrong first move.
BRIAN LEHRER
“So what's the alternative for getting out of there… (audio fades out)”
MIGUEL
I was pissed when I heard him say that. I almost called in! (Miguel Aside with phone audio sound effect: Hi, this is Miguel from Brooklyn, longtime listener. First time caller. I love your show. Brian. Jerry, have I got something to say to you...) Of course the government should be paying more to support art in the country I thought. Government support doesn’t mean that conservative Republicans will be responsible for curating exhibitions. That’s not their job!
But thennnn from the back of my brain, I remembered something else… (whispery sound)...
SENATOR JESSE HELMS
“Robert Mapplethorpe, a known homosexual, who died of AIDS, and who spent the last years of his life promoting homosexuality. Now if any senator doesn't know what I'm talking about, in terms of the art that I have protested, look at the picture. (dramatic music fades in and raises in volume with a protest chant echoing “Keep your hands off!” followed by a newsperson saying “Cincinnati Police closed down the Mapplethorpe exhibit.”)
MIGUEL
Robert Mapplethorpe (Miguel Aside: The Perfect Moment), Andres Serrano (Miguel Aside: Piss Christ), Senator Jesse Helms (“ugh” sound), the NEA 4 (Miguel Aside: Holly, Karen, John, Tim), the culture wars of the late 80’s, early 1990’s, Supreme Court, the question of censorship of the arts from the government and and and… (record scratch)
I’m getting ahead of myself. As usual. That particular era of controversy, well, that’s the story of Government funding that I’m familiar with because it happened right around the time that I was in college. And we’re gonna get into that story… But the fact is, the story doesn’t really start there. Once again, we have to go even further back in time….
(time to take a….) (exclamation of a disheartened “Noo” sound plays)
MIGUEL
Ok that song is already overplayed. This whole damn episode is a history break yo. Let’s go innnnnn...
(Big cymbal sound plays)
MIGUEL
I was curious to learn more about the history of Government funding in art - like, what happened before the NEA? And if there was government funding, how did that play out in the U.S.? Before Andres Serrano freaked out U.S. Senators with this notorious Piss Christ photograph, was it working? I’ve always thought of government funding for art as, well, never enough, or never for the kind of weirdo stuff that I’m interested in seeing or that I make for that matter. Most of my friends who make dance and performance here in what is referred to as the U.S. - we don’t really ever talk about Government funding - looking for it or expecting any of it for what we do. So what’s that about?
(Federal Theater Project audio) “Oh say can you sing, dance or act! If you can, well..” (audio fades into background)
MIGUEL
If you remember your high school history classes, you’ll recall that back in the 1930s, as a response to the Great Depression, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came up with the New Deal, his broad program to stimulate the economy with government funds. The New Deal led to the creation of the Works Progress Administration, which was charged with putting people back to work, including… artists. I spoke with Professor Sharon Ann Musher, author of Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture about the different art funding programs during the 1930s and early 40s.
PROFESSOR SHARON ANN MUSHER
“What's important to know about the WPA’s art projects, which were collectively known as “Federal One'', is that they were relief based. And what I mean by that is that, you had to be unemployed, you had to show your need, that you didn't have other resources. And there were some people who had resources, who were hired by the WPA, but for the most part, they were hired as administrators for it. So under the WPA, you have the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theaters Project, the Federal Art Project and the Federal Music Project. And I know that your particular interest is also in dance. So I just wanted to clarify that the Federal Dance Project was a unit that was within the Federal Theater Project. It was created in 1936, and included LA and modern, and vaudeville in teaching. That's the WPA scene.”
MIGUEL
Ok so I knew a little bit about these relief programs, but I didn’t know anything about a Federal Dance Project - I’ll talk more about that program in a minute. But there were other programs besides these…
PROFESSOR SHARON ANN MUSHER
“Then there was another set of art projects, most of which were based on merit, rather than need. And the merit model is the one that we're more familiar with today, because that's the one that we know about, from the NEA and the NEH,” (Miguel Aside: National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities…)
“That means you're an artist, you write a grant proposal, or you compete, you know, to be able to paint a mural on the side of the wall. And the best one is selected. So to clarify, the relief based model is you have some kind of basic credentials, you went into art school, and you can show your need. A merit model may have to do with those credentials, may not, often it does, because usually you need to have the credentials, and you need to have a fabulous idea, and you propose it. And it goes through all of these kinds of cultural elite, and they determine that you are worthy or not worthy. The second core merit based program was through the Treasury Department. And historically, the Treasury Department had always funded public art, that that was in charge of building funding the buildings of new buildings. And so they said a certain percentage would go towards decorating those buildings, and you'd get sculptures in them and you would get murals in them. So there was an organization called the Painting and Sculpture Section. And what happened there was artists would compete. There would be a new building, a new post office, and there would be a competition for who would get to decorate it, artists would send in submissions, they wouldn't be compensated for making their submissions, for creating their work. And if they were selected, then they would get the commission. And what was new about what the Treasury Department did through the Painting and Sculpture Section, was that it held blind competitions. And that was a new thing. So it wasn't just the few white men who had gone to the right schools in Europe, who painted in the correct styles, which was basically Roman, naked women and the like. But it was built on an idea of showing American culture and ideas often that was very regional and local to the post office that was, that was being painted.
MIGUEL
The Treasury Department?? Whoa, I had no idea that the Treasury Department was involved in art funding…
But hey, government funding of art precedes these 1930’s programs. (Oliver Shaw music comes in) The first example of direct funding of art by the government happens way back in 1817 when painter John Trumbull was commissioned to make four paintings in commemoration of the Revolutionary War for the Capitol building.
(Record Scratch sound)
(Dixie starts playing) In 1859, President James Buchanan appointed a National Arts Commission to “promote” the arts but it died two years later because of lack of Congressional Support. (Dixie music putters out)
Jump to 1910, when President Taft and the Congress established the National Commission of Fine Arts, which mostly dealt with the architectural appearance of buildings in Washington. The men, and, yes, it was all men, all white men, who sat on the commission, most famously Charles Moore and Central Park and Prospect Park designer Frederick Olmstead were inspired by the turn of the century Beaux Art movement, which in Europe had incorporated French neoclassicism and Roman ideals and which in the U.S. looked even further back to Ancient Greek notions of structure and beauty. These guys thought of art and beauty as a kind of moralizing force, which could be something to aspire to and unite the country. Professor Musher calls this approach to public art as “Art as Grandeur.” But with the onset of the Depression, this kind of thinking about art, the buildings that were being made, with their “colonnades, porticos, arches and arcades,” felt really out of step with the economic conditions people were facing, which, in turn, were shaping a desire for a different kind of art.
PROFESSOR SHARON ANN MUSHER
“You know, the transition that I think we see is a movement away from the idea that art is grandeur and something that should uplift people with classical imagery, that heralds back to an ancient time... Instead, we see a shift to focusing on daily life, and looking for heroes and heroines in one's community, in one's hometown, in one's founding story, a shift that goes from this artist grandeur… we’re going to look towards Europe, we're going to look towards the classics to... we're going to look for, to uncover and create, an American tradition, and that that transition is going to be built on ordinary people and ordinary people's experiences. We're going to represent, you know, the postal worker, we're going to represent working class people, even with the complications around race and gender that come up with that.
MIGUEL
So, the art was changing, the politics was changing, and, of course, the composition of who the artists were was also changing…
PROFESSOR SHARON ANN MUSHER
“You know, we have things like the rise of, you know, the use of social realism by, or social viewpoint by artists on the left, many of whom were members of the Communist Party, or fellow travelers, many of whom were first or second generation immigrants, often living in urban areas. Many of them were northeastern. So you had a lot of artists on the left, but then you have lots of other artists. You had a Midwestern regionalist, you had folks who were really interested in capturing the American heartland or capturing their, their particular regions and expressing them. So you have lots of different tensions at the same time”
MIGUEL
Sooo this starts to get into something that is going to be a recurring theme or problem when it comes to public funding of the arts. What is or who is an American? And what is the “appropriate” behavior or appropriate range of interests for an American artist? especially one who wants to get government support for the arts, the money of which is essentially culled from taxes that these same Americans have paid. And then there’s the elephant in the room - race.
Ok but a short aside about the short lived Federal Dance Project. A story within a story! (Dreamy Harp sound plays)
MIGUEL
Shortly after the Federal Theater Project was created with Hallie Flanagan in charge, a group of New York based dancers (faint techno music plays in background) felt like there should be a relief project that was dance specific. So this led to the formation of the Federal Dance Project, which had a really ambitious and fairly unrealistic mandate - in the first six months of 1936 they had $155,000 (about 3 million in today’s dollars) to go towards “costume and scenery for eight productions, a theater for performances, a support staff of administrative and office workers and well as theater workers, and 185 dancers, all of whom were to be on home relief.”* The first director of the FDP was Don Oscar Becque, and dance units were set up in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Tampa, and Portland, Oregon.
But pretty quickly, the FDP came under fire by the dance community because three months into the program, only 85 dancers had been hired, far short of the promised 185, which led to a demonstration and occupation of the New York Federal Theater Project offices by dancers who demanded that all unemployed dancers should now be hired by the FDP.
Now, this kind of equity demand was definitely admirable, but beyond the mandate expectations there were glaring holes in terms of who got support and who didn’t. As far as I can tell, I didn’t find any black choreographers or dancers who were supported by the Federal Dance Project. Black choreographers and performers such as Asadata Dafora and Katherine Dunham were, however, supported through the Federal Theater Project… About the closest the FDP got to supporting Black artists, and this is definitely a questionable example, was when it helped produce “How Long Brethren?” a dance by Helen Tamiris, who was a white choreographer well known for her leftist politics. Her piece quote unquote ”addressed” racial injustice by incorporating black spirituals sung by the Federal Theater Negro Choir (who sang from offstage, and who weren’t credited in the program). But just so we’re clear, this piece that allegedly depicts the struggles of African Americans in the South contained zero African American dancers.
So lots of criss crossing problems here. The Federal Dance Project did little for black artists, but still put a lot of white folks to work thanks to a lot of agitation from the dancers. As a result, the Federal Dance Project became a bane for the Federal Theater Project, which itself came under fire very intensely by the U.S. government. Why did the FTP get such flack?
PROFESSOR SHARON ANN MUSHER
“So I think that the politics of the art administrators and the artists themselves really matter. Hallie Flanagan, who was the director of the Federal Theater Project, encouraged her actors to use the theater as what she called a thorn in the flesh. Her tasks in the Federal Theater Project, as I mentioned, were occasionally, only occasionally, integrated, and she also did not hide her own admiration of Soviet theatre. All of this in the context of the House of Un-American (Miguel: Activities Committee...) Yes, thank you-- sorry-- was controversial, she also employed actors and dancers who had a proclivity towards street activism. The modern dancers, to mention the dancers-- the dancers especially were dramatic. They danced on the picket lines, they engaged in hunger strikes. All of this is to explain, I think, why Congress stopped funding the Theater Project in 1939, four years before it cut funding for the rest of Federal One.”
MIGUEL
Tim Robbins’ 1999 film Cradle Will Rock dramatizes what went down with Hallie Flanagan and the Federal Theater Project. The movie tells the story of a musical about labor and unions, which was written by openly gay composer Marc Blitzstein, as well as the plight that Hallie Flanagan faced in having to appear before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. In this scene we hear an exchange between FTP director Hallie Flanagan and Texas Representative Martin Dies Jr. at a Congressional Hearing where the Federal Theater Project is being taken to task for the content of some of its left leaning plays...
(Audio starts at 1:30:31 from the film…)
MARTIN DIES JR.
“You have established the precedent of exhibiting a play that champions the cause of public ownership of utilities. You said that you thought that was proper? And you thought that you had a right to do that?
HALLIE FLANAGAN
“I think so.”
MARTIN DIES JR.
“And now if the same play proved that the public ownership of railroads was a good thing, well you would do it too, would you not?”
HALLIE FLANAGAN
“Absolutely and the test is, is it a good play?”
MARTIN DIES JR.
“And if someone came with a play, showing the public ownership of all the lands in the United States, and it was a good play? (Crowd around the two laughs) Well, you would do that too, would you not?”
HALLIE FLANAGAN
“Well that is, a very clever move on your part to maneuver me into a certain position.”
MARTIN DIES JR.
“I do not pretend to any cleverness.”
HALLIE FLANAGAN
“No, I would not. We would stop at that, because that would be recommending the overthrow of the United States government. And I do not want that gentleman, whatever some of the previous witnesses have intimated.”
MARTIN DIES JR.
“In other words, you would favor doing it by degrees, but not all at once. Isn't that right?” (Sound of a camera firing)
MIGUEL
As Sharon said, the government stopped supporting the Federal Theater Project in 1939, precisely because of right wing anger about the leftist content of the supported work, which, it must be said, was just a fraction of the overall work that was supported. Why did the quote unquote “radical” stuff get so much attention?
PROFESSOR SHARON ANN MUSHER
“I mean, I think that's the general story of Federal One, right? I mean, so many of the projects, for example, we haven't talked that much about the Community Arts centers, the Federal Music Project that was giving piano lessons to kids. I mean, all of the kids oriented or community engagement oriented work was-- sometimes the artists who worked in those centers were controversial, especially when they were New York artists, especially when they came from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and then they go to different places-- that caused some level of controversy, but so much of Federal One wasn't controversial. There is always going to be controversy tied to patronage. There's all these politics around, you know, don't bite the hand that feeds you. I think the question is, does it matter if that hand comes from the public sector or the private sector. In either case, there are going to be politics around this. Now. You could argue that the thing to do is to fund the least controversial art, or the most civically engaged or community engaged, you could argue the thing to do is do it on the basis of relief, just hiring artists who are in need. I think the prominent model that we've had, certainly since the 60s has been this NEA, NEH, we should hire on the basis of merit, and merit will be determined by a group of cultural elites. That seems like a problematic model to me. I don't have the perfect solution for how to do it, because I think any model we use will cause controversy. Right. So I've been arguing that we should shift from a merit based model to a relief based model because that's what we need right now. Why don't we see artists as essential workers, and you know, focus on compensating them accordingly. If we move to that model, though, it's likely to cause a backlash, right? I mean, that's what happened. That was the backlash to Federal One, where all of a sudden you see loyalty oaths being put into place, you have to swear that you're not a communist, and have never been part of the Communist Party, you had to swear that you needed relief. All these kinds of things that, you know, turned off any kind of artists who could afford not to do that, who could find other sorts of venues. So it's all complicated.”
MIGUEL
“Loyalty oaths…” Hmmm.. put a pin on that for the next episode…
I don’t know this, all, starts to make me wonder about the whole project of government funding for the arts… and Sharon is critical about it as well,
PROFESSOR SHARON ANN MUSHER
“Federal One helped to democratize art, both in terms of its production, and in terms of experiences of it. But at the same time, the projects were racially segregated, they hired many fewer women and people of color than white men. There were all kinds of issues that emerged-- mixed race cast in the Federal Theater Project raised significant controversy. And in fact, it was one of the key things that contributed, or one of the points, that contributed to shutting down the project four years before the other art projects.”
MIGUEL
But she also manages to stay positive about it.
PROFESSOR SHARON ANN MUSHER
“And you have to think about all that the FTP and all that Federal One accomplished, in a short amount of time, is really profound. There are all these stories of people who had never seen live theatre before, who all of a sudden experience it for the first time, people who had never seen a work of art, and it's brought to their Community Art Center in a traveling exhibit, and they get to see art for the first time, they get to create things themselves. This was short lived, and problematic and not accessible to everyone. And yet, it was revolutionary in some ways, in democratizing access to our experiences of art and creative experiences.
MIGUEL
So to review and also fill in some of the blanks, we can break down the criticism of the WPA (a funky beat plays in the background) into five main points, which foreshadow the criticism we pretty much always encounter when talking about government support for the arts.
Criticism #1 This democratizing program wasn’t doling out governmental funds equitably, even though it definitely kept some artists from starvation.
Criticism #2 - Government funding produced mediocre art. Like, if anyone (anyone white) could have access to this money, then that meant you weren’t singling out the best artists or the best projects. Critics weren’t so down with the idea that these artists were in fact cultural workers. The idea here is that if you make art it has to be excellent or extraordinary, otherwise it’s not worth giving you money.
Criticism #3 - which is very on brand with American economic thinking - was that this money was wasteful! It was being poorly managed, poorly administered, etc, etc. This is kind of the perennial conservative or libertarian argument that big government is bad! Art is a luxury, not a necessity!
Criticism #4 - which is sort of related to criticism number 3, if these artists hadn’t succeeded commercially prior to the WPA, why give them support now? Let the marketplace sort it out!
And...
Criticism #5 - is the one that intrigues me the most. It was this worry that governmental money was going to support leftists and communists and whoever else was deemed “Un-American” ... people who were critical of the U.S. government and so why should they be getting governmental support if the work they’re gonna make is going to destroy the American way of life!
This of course gets back to the whole “Who is American?” which is a great segue into the next chapter of Government funding for art that I wanna get into……
(Transition music plays then fades into background)
MIGUEL
So yeah, even if you didn’t know all of the specifics about the New Deal programs, you probably had some idea that they existed. But the next chapter of Government funding for dance - well let’s just say it came as a complete surprise to me!
I was reading Tyler Cowen’s book Good & Plenty: Creative Successes of American Arts Funding, and, just fyi, he’s a libertarian economist who’s NOT into government funding for the arts, but anyhoo, he talked about how actually the most significant era for arts funding was actually in the middle of the 20th century. In fact, it’s under the Eisenhower Republican administration in 1953 that we get the greatest number of dollars to support art as quote unquote, Cultural Outreach - 129 million dollars - which, if you account for inflation, would be about 1.2 billion in today’s dollars. What was going on??
I spoke with another professor who I know - yes, I know a lot of professors - Clare Croft, who hones in on this era in her book, Dancers As Diplomats: American Choreography and Cultural Exchange. I asked her to summarize the main points of her research…
CLARE CROFT
“Yeah, so in Dancers as Diplomats, I was particularly interested in programs that funded dance through the US State Department. And I was really fascinated to realize that it was quite a large program starting in the 1950s, running into the 1970s, when the program really gets overhauled in substantial ways and winds up funding dance less.”
MIGUEL
I’m gagged… We have the Treasury Department supporting art in the earlier part of the 1900’s.. and now we’re talking about the State Department?
CLARE CROFT
“What does it mean that the State Department? So the organization most interested on relationships between the US and the rest of the world, was interested in dance, while I wrote primarily about dance, these were programs that funded a ton of music, as well. And at various points have also funded visual arts. And so what do visual arts, music, and dance share? One thing was kind of a notion that they were somehow beyond language, that we could speak English and Spanish, and not be able to communicate through that way, but that we could go to the same dance performance and sort of share an experience.”
MIGUEL
So why was all this support for art and dance happening at this time in history?
CLARE CROFT
“So the State Department's interest in cultural diplomacy-- so sending art, an artist abroad as a way to, quote unquote, carry an American message abroad-- was very much part of a Cold War cultural agenda. And while I have many critiques about the kind of US exceptionalism, and you know, a very flawed notion that the US has somehow perfected an idea of democracy that was then to be exported to the Soviet Union, and other places that were understood to be under the Soviet influence. You know, that was really the main impetus in the program was ideas of democracy, freedom, and you're hearing my voice, but there’s air quotes around all of these. Very much part of a kind of Eisenhower initiative, that those were ideas that the US could bring into the world. I think the other thing that's important to know that's a big emphasis in the book is-- so the US had a problem in the 50s and 60s, meaning they're trying to say we've got this great democratic system. Meanwhile, especially as TVs start to move into broad circulation, anyone who can see coverage from the US sees democracy is clearly limited to a few as particularly civil rights protests in the South show up on TV. So there's a pretty big emphasis in these programs as well in saying the American democratic program is not perfect. It is sort of expanding, and people are gaining rights within the American democratic system. And that was sort of a way of framing civil rights protest in a, if you will, more positive light, which caused a lot of interesting tensions and contradictions in the program as particularly black dancers were touring abroad, on behalf of the US State Department, while also knowing what's happening in their homes, in their home cities. And also a number of them talk about realizing they had greater freedom of movement in social and public spaces outside of the US, than they did within the US.
MIGUEL
Now the grand irony of a cultural outreach program that was intended to promote democracy is that the process by which companies were selected was anything but democratic… I asked Clare about this process…
CLARE CROFT
“There were kind of rows of gatekeepers that were kind of funneling different groups towards it. So in the 50s Limón is the first to travel, the Limón Dance Company (Miguel Aside: that's American choreographer, Jose Limón) but a lot of the emphasis in the early years after Limón was on sending kind of the big ballet companies abroad. American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, go on quite well known tours early on. And part of how they wind up on the tours is the advisory panel ANTA (Miguel Aside: that's the American National Theatre and Academy) which was a kind of affiliate organization, not a government organization. But more or less in sort of today's parlance, it would be like they had the contract to enact the State Department program. And so the advisory board for dance includes Lincoln Kirstein, (Miguel Aside: co-founder of the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine), and Lucia Chase (Miguel Aside: director of the American Ballet Theatre). So representatives from the big ballet companies were on the panels doing the selecting, but also part of the selection process is about sort of really explicitly countering what Soviet artists are being sent abroad, which is also how the big ballet companies get on the radar because both the Maryinsky and the Bolshoi come to the US in late 50s, and early 60s. And there's ????-- his book was an important foundation for my own-- talks about the quote unquote ballet wars. As the 60s move on, there's more of an emphasis on modern dance, sort of being able to frame it, to use the language of the day, which doesn't translate well into present day language, but was sort of talked about as an indigenous dance form. Of course, that doesn't mean indigenous the way we should think about it today, but the degree to which modern dance, along with jazz was sort of seen as a particularly American export. And so that's where you see Graham (Aside: Martha Graham), Ailey (Aside: Alvin Ailey), those kinds of companies being sort of taken up. And that's really about saying, the US has its own arts culture that emphasizes-- also sort of a notion of modern dance-- emphasizing universality and freedom, which you can see how those things would play out differently in Graham and Ailey’s work and the way they talk about their work. But (it) is an interesting shared value if interpreted differently by each.”
MIGUEL
So once again, but in a different way, we find the mechanism of financial distribution to be less than democratic… That being said.. this State Department support extended beyond merely paying for the planet tickets and food…
CLARE CROFT
“In some cases, as many as eight weeks of preparation was funded. And then the tour itself was normally quite long, people tended to be on the road for at least a month, often more like two months. And of course, during that period of time, the full company generally plus two to three support staff are on the road being paid, housed, fed. If they're funding a rehearsal period and touring, we're talking about four months of the year that the State Department is not just picking up the bill, but actually allowing a dance company to really function in a quite robust way. The chores were hard, you know, and I've never talked to anyone who said like, Oh, I was paid incredibly well or incredibly well taken care of. But you know, there was salary and there was all the sort of needs on tour subsidized, though people were performing a lot every week, and often in less than ideal circumstances. The performances in Soviet Union were often in big fancy theaters. But other than that, it was a lot of like outdoor theaters, people talked about Marley so hot that they had trouble stepping on it… you know. So these were not luxurious tours, but they funded a lot and the last thing I'll say is, you know, part of why I think it's important to talk about this is what we sometimes call the American Dance Boom of the 60s and 70s. These big companies, that many of whom are still with us in some form today, were really born out of public funding at critical moments. I don't think the Ailey company would be anything like the mammoth enterprise it is now without State Department funding. It did provide a level of resource that just feels full on unparalleled. Today, the idea of the government, where you pull down 1/3 of the year's budget is, there's... there's no possibility of that today.”
MIGUEL
This pressure of being “American” abroad translated into some pretty rough situations for some of the dance artists…
CLARE CROFT
“I think Ailey himself is kind of the best example. I was sort of shocked, but not totally surprised to find meeting minutes when people were selected for the tours, but also minutes of various correspondence with people once they were selected. And Alvin Ailey is called in by the State Department, and told, quote, to walk the straight and narrow path while he was on tour. So not exactly a euphemism for not being an out, bisexual man, which is what he was, and was, you know, relatively, like… open secret is probably not quite the right term. I don't think anybody in the company was unaware of his sexuality. And like many men who were having sex with people of the same sex in the mid-century, he had an arrest record for being arrested in a bathroom in LA in the late 50s. And so, also the fact that before you went on tour, the FBI would generally do some sort of background check and Ailey's arrest record has to come up every time and… like he still gets the funding, he still gets to go, but under duress in a certain way. And a lot of the artists, particularly the black artists talked about the stress and burden. Even if the directions weren't explicit as they were with particularly gay men on the tours, the sort of burden of representation was quite literal. Arthur M. talked a lot-- and I write about in the book-- that he came back from the City Ballet tour and all his hair was falling out, he'd been so stressed. And it really seems like it stemmed from, on one hand, he was incredibly lauded as this black man performing with them. But that was a really difficult thing to carry, in addition to doing eight shows a week, which is what he was also doing. And also, the last thing I would say was that the women were often given messages that they weren't to be as kind of exploratory. Guys were given a lot more latitude to kind of strike out on their own.”
MIGUEL
As with Federal One during the WPA, the whole project of government funding provokes the question of What is an American? Especially here with this money from the State Department being channeled into touring as a form of cultural diplomacy, it’s hard to get past the idea that this could be anything other than propaganda - a carefully curated form of democracy in which the dance artists themselves were, in some ways, pawns.
CLARE CROFT
“How do you avoid some monolithic definition of America, or a romanticized notion of the melting pot in the selection process? Just by virtue of some are chosen, and some are not, who gets chosen has a particular image. And then also when they're trying to sort of recraft a notion of American towards something we might call a more progressive vision, you know, what does it mean that lots of programs were sending primarily black companies abroad. Meanwhile, black people are being treated terribly for asking for basic rights in the context of the US. And these are really real, everyday contradictions, that dancers really felt the idea that the nation is being shaped at an institutional and government level. It's being shaped at a real everyday level. And then it's also being shaped in the lives of artists, like how these programs were functioning, not dissimilar from how like studying abroad if someone's in college, a student does. And I think that was a really interesting piece to me that there's a generation of dancers, albeit just in these big companies, but who got to go have an experience abroad on the State Department dime. And artists are smart people, they saw all the contradictions. Nobody was coming home, waving American flags without any critique anymore or something. But I think that's a really valuable experience to get to travel in that way and experience another place as a dancer.”
MIGUEL
Ok so I guess I’m back on board with this whole government funding business. And despite all of the difficulties that she examines in her book Claire is on board as well.
CLARE CROFT
“I think these programs remind us we need public funding. And we need public funding for the arts that's explicitly about the arts. But we also need public funding that helps artists survive. And one of the things I'm interested in, in that kind of 50s 60s moment, was the State Department that was managing to do both. Like actually meet their goals, while also creating a program that truly supported artists. And that just feels like a bigger way of thinking about public funding, that a lot of what we have now, which is relatively small grants that, you know, may not even be worth the amount of time it takes to apply, like truly broad supportive public programs are really necessary. And it's important to know that these people we imagine as like, quote unquote, geniuses of the 20th century, benefited from massive public funding infrastructure. It's not an accident that artists who were funded well make better art.”
MIGUEL
My conversation with Clare Croft almost ended there, with her robust endorsement of government funding for the arts. But then our conversation kept going and eventually, another shading on the idea came into the conversation.
CLARE CROFT
“I am in massive support of public funding for the art… but, I also think the real public funding we need is actually universal basic income-- not in the Andrew Yang model-- widely-available health insurance... I actually think that the call from the arts to public government funds given where we are right now is probably better targeted towards things that support all people who are working at not a decent wage. That’s kind of where I am in my own personal journey on arts advocacy, like understanding that these other public supports are so absent that I think arts funding is stuck in… basically whack-a-mole? So like in the arts, should we be advocating for this cabinet level position of the arts or should we be like... working really hard to abolish the filibuster. And I think right now probably things like abolishing the filibuster, and voting rights, and you know… artists living in red states really organizing to sort of show that situation is probably the real value in public funding. (Faint harmonious humming fades in and plays in the background) And I think understanding that as public funding for the arts is maybe a leap that needs to be made.”
MIGUEL
It’s interesting to me that both Sharon and Clare argue for the importance of government funding for the arts, while also landing on this idea that current government funding should focus on financial need and basic human social services. Color me cynical, but it strikes me as a kind of useful conflict to set up, on the part of those in the government who hate supporting the arts, that we have to choose between money to support artists’ work versus money to support social justice, which in this case means people’s ability to stay alive given that we live in a country that doesn’t offer a guaranteed income or universal health care or child care or elder care or any number of services that you could count on having like paved roads (Aside: Girl, have you been out in these streets?) or safe running water (Miguel Aside: Uhh...Flint, Michigan. Fracking).
Like Sharon pointed out, the model that we’ve been using is a merit based one… and, well that brings up a whole other pandora’s box of questions… because, who decides what is worthy or excellent art? Whose point of view is guiding those decisions? I wonder if there’s another situation where those questions really came to a head....
(Audio of Jesse Helms plays: “I don’t even acknowledge that it’s art, I don’t even acknowledge the feller who did it is an artist. I think he was a jerk.”)
MIGUEL
There he is… Él diablo himself, (distorted, echoing filter on voice) Jesse Helms…
(Ambient music plays in background)
In our next episode we will zero in on the National Endowment for the Arts, specifically, the culture wars of the early 1990s. I speak with a few of the artists who were dubbed the NEA 4, as well as with the man who directed the NEA at the time. I really hope you’ll come back and listen.
But that won’t be for a few weeks! We are gonna let these first three episodes circulate a bit so you’ll be hearing from me again in the second week of September, okay. Okay? But I want to let you know about something special - in a future episode, we are going to look at how dance artists in the U.S. are making it work in terms of financing their work, or getting funding, or making their work without any funding. So if that’s you, please call our special voicemail number where you can leave a brief, one minute message telling us your story and hey, it might just end up in the episode. That number to call is 347-559-5099. Once again it’s (whispers) 347-559-5099.
Thank you to Professors Sharon Ann Musher and Clare Croft who I spoke with today - I really hope you’ll read their books.
Today’s episode sourced additional information from Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City 1928 to 1942 which was written by Ellen Graff, and The National Endowment for the Arts: 1965-2000, a brief chronology of federal support for the arts, which was written by… somebody!
Are You For Sale? is supported by the National Performance Network’s Storytelling fund, Brown University Arts Initiative, Dance NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund and Creating New Futures.
By the way, we got some very helpful feedback that the first two episodes were a little quiet for so I went back and remixed them so hopefully they should sound better now. Big gratitude for that note and please know we ALWAYS welcome feedback!
(Ambient music ends and remix version of “O Say Can You Sing Dance or Act!” plays in the background)
Our managing producer is Michelle Fletcher, our production assistants are Jake Cedar, Camryn Stafford and Kirsten Pardo.
The title of this podcast comes from a line in Morgan Parker’s poem Welcome to the Jungle and yes I made the theme song and the instrumental background music and I edited it because I am the Barbra Streisand of Performance. (brief audio clip of Barbra Streisand singing “Papa can you hear me?” from Yentl)
You can learn about everyone you heard from today and read a transcript of the episode at our website areyouforsalepodcast.com. You can also write to us at areyouforsalepodcast@gmail.com.
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Until next time, stay weird, make art, stay blessed, not stressed. Adios everyone!