Starving Artists?: Exploring (and Advancing) Radical Economies of Theater
Seminar Description
In Todd London and Ben Pesner’s comprehensive study of the new work sector, they note that only 3% of a playwright’s income today comes from royalties, and that a commission typically pays $3000-$4000 for projects that take six months to two years. These statistics suggest that, for artists generating new theater in the US today, there really is no “economy” of theater. In response to this study, the American Voices New Play Institute has taken a radical approach: they have given five playwrights a two-year residency that includes a full-time salary, benefits, housing, control over the development process and money earmarked to fund that process, and a commitment to produce their works in the mainstage season. In exchange, the resident playwrights are required to… work on whatever projects they want, existing or new, finishing them or not. The program is radical in that it separates the funding from a specific artistic product, and it assumes that good art comes from artists who are well-fed, not artists who are starving. It is not, however, an entirely new idea; it has much in common with the historical system of patronage, particularly royal patronage administered by the court rather than by an individual.
For this roundtable, I invite artists, administrators, scholars, and historians to participate in a structured conversation exploring radical approaches to funding theater. I am particularly interested in participants who can speak to existing examples of radical economies in theater.
Eight invited participants will prepare a 5-8 page precis on a specific project that represents a radical approach to funding in the theater, contextualizes that approach in theater history, and evaluates the impact that approach might have on the resulting art and on the practice of theater in general. The precis will be circulated among the roundtable participants well in advance of the conference, and the convener will identify affinities among them. Each participant will then be asked to distill someone else’s precis into a one-page summary, participating in a cooperative revision process with the original author, and, as an original author with a distiller on their own work. The resulting one-page “distillations” will be distributed to audience members at our conference session to facilitate participation in breakout discussion groups led by the roundtable participants, and focusing on brainstorming ways to advance radical approaches to theater funding.
D. Ohlandt, Ph.D. 