It's late on a Friday afternoon in January, and Judy Lisi, president of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, is taking a moment to decompress in a lounge of the Essex House hotel in New York City. She's been through three solid days and nights of panel discussions, theater and dance showcases, wheelings and dealings and high-priced cocktails. And star power: In just this one day she's attended lectures by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner and dancer/choreographer/provocateur Bill T. Jones.
"This is huge," says Lisi.
She's not exaggerating. "This" may be the most important marketplace for live performing arts in the United States. Every January, performers, agents and presenters from all over the world come together for the annual NYC conferences of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and the International Society for the Performing Arts, known to the cognoscenti as APAP and ISPA. This year's assemblage, more than 3,000 strong, gathered at the Hilton and Essex hotels from Jan. 4-11, where they made deals that would determine what Americans will be seeing in arts centers, theaters and concert halls for years to come, and in some cases as soon as this spring.
APAP/ISPA is perhaps the one week of the year when you can expect to find Lisi and her counterparts from Clearwater and Sarasota all doing business under a single roof. Like her, Robert Freedman, president of Ruth Eckerd Hall, and John Wilkes, executive director of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, travel to New York to see new work, and to polish up relationships with agents and other presenters. Dues are not cheap (about $1,400 for large organizations, and that's before conference and travel fees), and word spreads quickly when deals go bad or when a showcase is a flop. But attendance, the presenters say, is a must – and what they see is, in many cases, what you'll get.
Snappy Dance Theater director Martha Mason is at the front of a small stage, pushing back her hair and explaining the streaming video just over her shoulder. For a moment, you're not sure what you're seeing: the comical image shows a four-legged person plodding about with no head. It's beautiful and odd; Mason expresses a love for the "creepy and absurd," and explains that the piece was inspired by the macabre humor of Edward Gorey.She's only got five minutes to talk – just a moment to convince a few hundred presenters in a conference room to recognize the funky appeal of her Boston-based dance group. But Mason's got at least one audience member's attention: Lisi's. Despite the fact that Mason has been wedged into a line-up of international acts including the stentorian Bill T. Jones, she and her seven dancers were noticed. "I thought it was fresh and accessible," Lisi would later say. "There is a lot of opportunity with that little company."
After the presentation, Lisi seeks out Mason and asks her about Snappy Dance's rates, touring dates and what kind of community and educational work they could do. For this small troupe, a Florida gig would mean more exposure, more chances to hone their art. For Lisi, taking on the roughly $10,000 expense of bringing them to Tampa would mean an infusion of new art into the Bay area, and the chance to enhance the educational programs at the center. TBPAC's operating budget is $30 million, but with five stages to fill and more than 750 events to plan in a single year, the money goes quickly.
Lisi thinks it out. She's also intrigued by another presentation that morning – one by the Canadian-based music-theater company Gryphon Trio. Their 85-minute multi-media performance piece Constantinople contemplates Christian and Muslim themes, and would cost the center about $20,000.
When Lisi returns to Tampa, she and three other staffers attending the conference will decide whether these shows will wind up in an upcoming season. Either could provide an answer to the challenge issued the same day by Bill T. Jones: "Do you want a discourse in your town?" he called out to the presenters. "How do we get people talking in your town?"
For Ruth Eckerd Hall's Robert Freedman and director of entertainment Bobby Rossi, this year's conference answers lots of questions.Questions, for instance, about Whoopi Goldberg. Her ever-changing show has been through so many incarnations, from stand-up routine to legit theater to HBO, that they wonder what they'll be getting if they book her for Ruth Eckerd. But, after attending the conference and seeing the show on Broadway, the two agree that Goldberg's content is right for Clearwater audiences. "[Seeing it] is what sealed the deal," says Rossi.
Meanwhile, Bill Cosby's name has been penciled into the hall's calendar for months, but only tentatively. Ruth Eckerd needs to insure the comedian's agent that Cosby will be guaranteed two area performances (costs are high, shows are expensive and one gig would not suffice). Ruth Eckerd wants to bring Cosby to the area, but needs another venue for a second showing. During the conference, the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall in Fort Myers steps forward. As a result, the increasingly political Cosby will likely be returning to Florida to play both cities in February 2006.
Also firmed up for Ruth Eckerd in New York are the Broadway shows Doctor Doolittle for January 2006 and Bombay Dreams for December 2005. Freedman's connections – he's a longtime APAP member and a Tony voter – help Ruth Eckerd secure shows like Doolittle, which Rossi says will be touring prior to a Broadway run. "Any edge you can get in this market can make a difference," he says. Having a $15 million budget also doesn't hurt.
Van Wezel's John Wilkes explains it like this: "The name of the game is money." He cuts a stylish but businesslike figure in his navy suit and mauve tie, a fitting look for a man who must balance both aesthetic and fiscal concerns. Wilkes stops mid-sentence to shake hands with one of the many similarly clad agents and presenters passing by in the Hilton lobby, including Freedman.
Theirs is a complicated relationship, as are most in the arts-presenting world, since presenters often compete with one another to secure acts; other times, as with Cosby, they work together. Meanwhile, the presenters and agents, who handle the artists' contracts, politely haggle over costs and dates.
Everyone tries to serve their own needs with the thought that the process – the clinching of a deal – is mutually beneficial: Art is made, art is seen, people earn a livelihood, culture and knowledge are expanded.
"The challenge for us is to offer the different ranges in entertainment that we've had over the years, whatever the genre may be," Wilkes says. Achieving that range, however, has been getting more and more difficult due to funding challenges that have affected all arts agencies, and to the existence of what he called "territorial egos." Too often, says Wilkes, agents and other presenters underestimate the ability of an artist to draw a crowd. The result has sometimes been unfair to both artist and audience.
He points to a pair of Elvis Costello bookings as one example. TBPAC and Ruth Eckerd landed the rocker for shows on consecutive days a year ago, but neither of the 2,200-plus seat venues sold out. In his opinion, had the 1,700-seat Van Wezel – which is farther away and courts a different audience than the two neighboring theaters – been chosen, the results would have been different. In Wilkes' scenario, if either Tampa or Ruth Eckerd had paired with Van Wezel in presenting Costello, both places would have sold out.
Still, Wilkes says his relationship with the other regional presenters is solid.
"We're in it because we love the arts."
Since late 2001, Florida presenters and artists have ridden the roiling economic waves that followed in the wake of Sept. 11. Conditions were aggravated two years later when the Florida legislature killed a 15-year-old arts trust fund responsible for putting millions into the hands of local state arts groups and artists. Now, with an additional tax on ticket sales being considered by lawmakers, Florida presenters are beginning to cringe. It's a frightening prospect, says Rossi. Large-scale performances can easily cost $20,000, and any additional expenses figured into the equation translate into higher-priced tickets and smaller audiences. The state cuts have been responsible for a $100,000 drop for Ruth Eckerd Hall alone. "It's got to come from somewhere," Rossi says of the lost funds, and too often the saving must come from axing a show or giving up a needed hire.
In response, live arts venues are redoubling their efforts to catch audiences' eyes. As Lisi explains it, presenters must contend with the mind-bogglingly deep pockets and ubiquitous advertising campaigns of movies and TV. So they're fighting back; the Tampa center now devotes 15 percent of its budget to marketing alone. While live acts incur new costs with each performance, the expenses of filmed or taped media diminish with each playback, and few new costs are involved. Nothing less than a true diversity of art is at risk, Lisi says, and the dollars favor electronic media.
"How do you break through that?" she asks, referring to the millions spent by films and TV on ad campaigns. "We're barraged. It's very hard for us, and to me that's our biggest challenge."
She's not the only one who sees live arts in Florida threatened by insufficient funds and a monolithic art culture. Gaylen Phillips, arts administration manager with the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, has been attending the New York winter conferences for years. For the first time in recent memory, says Phillips, state arts agencies within the Southern and Northeastern U.S. are banding together to share information.
She met at APAP with her counterpart in Pennsylvania, for example, and learned that the state has successfully sought out dollars from private groups like the Heinz Endowments (as in Teresa Heinz) to bolster the state's arts funding efforts. That conversation encouraged her to redouble her efforts to go after corporate and private arts investment in Florida. She's also looking into ways the state could pair off with other states for "block booking," which enables each state to lower the costs of bringing artists to their area by working together with other states – essentially buying in bulk.
Phillips explains all this with hands spread wide, and gestures that stretch halfway across the table. Unlike the business-suited presenters and agents, Phillips looks anything but bureaucratic in her casual green shirt-jacket. She repeatedly focuses her concern on the back roads of Florida.
The legislature's thumbs-down on the arts trust fund in 2003 has had the most pronounced effect in rural areas, where fewer dollars are available to send Florida artists touring through the state's highways and into classrooms, Phillips says. Without that contact, rural Floridians, particularly children, risk losing out on all the benefits art brings – a connection to a larger world, new stories and concepts, and ultimately the unveiling of democracy through the exchange of ideas.
"The story is, for the kid in Dixie County, this could be their first viewing of live performance," she says. In her world – as in the worlds of Lisi, Freedman and Wilkes – access and dollars reign supreme.
Even Jackie Onassis would agree. I spot the former first lady, or rather the woman portraying her, in the Hilton, where she's working the APAP "resource room" – 20,000 square feet of booths spread out through seven large rooms and three floors. This is where all the booking and formal deal-making occurs, and this is Jackie's first time at the conference; she's dropped nearly $500 to participate.At first, Jackie sizes me up. My nametag is obscured by my notepad. She has no idea who I am: Agent? Presenter? Conference rep verifying her credentials? She looks as uncertain as I about what exactly we're doing here. I show my pen and press badge to calm both our nerves. We walk, and Jackie – real name, Andree Stolte of New York – lets me take photos.
The two of us stroll through the resource room, past the booths of powerhouse agents like the New York-based IMG Artists, which represents folks like Jones and the acclaimed Chinese choreographer Shen Wei, and lesser-known outfits like Tampa Bay's Producers Inc. Stolte, as Jackie, leads the way, drawing focus even when passing a troupe of colorfully painted dancers from Taipei.
Stolte has written short plays and children's stories, but she's attending the conference to attract attention to a different kind of story – Jackie Undressed, her one-woman show about Jackie's identity crisis on the eve of President Kennedy's inauguration.
And she walks away successful, garnering the attention of presenters from as far away as China. Because of APAP, and some notices she's received online, Stolte's hoping to tour her show no later than 2006.
APAP was "fabulous" and "surreal," she tells me a few weeks later. "At times it was like being in a casino, because there's no clocks or daylight. It's like being in a fish bowl with all your peers."
Or maybe like being on stage. In the resource room that day, she stood next to the dancers from Taipei to pose for a photo. The snapshot froze the moment, but no camera could have captured the feeling of being there and watching this massive space fill with sound and watchful passersby. Here was a place where stagecraft ruled, where new faces with the right skills and contacts could go a long way. The exchanges were exhaustive, enlightening, but then – just like that – they were over.
This was the theater behind the theater. The marketplace itself was a work of art – and it was live.
You can contact Allyson Gonzalez at allyson.gonzalez@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Jan 26 – Feb 1, 2005.
