Octavio Campos decided, against his better judgment, to fly to New York. He was a featured guest of the art agency Pentacle, and his guest status basically meant he'd join hundreds of others performing in New York, expressly for the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference, or APAP.
For him, it was a chance to break free of his normal routine as a multi-media teacher at the New World School of the Arts in Miami. But his New York showcase flopped. He didn't like the City Center space where he performed; it didn't have the right feel for his "modular dance theater" piece Luna del Penguino (The Penguin's Moon). And here he was, a larger-than-life, former German opera house brat, and not one presenter contacted him – despite the fact that his work has been well-received in German and Canadian circles.
Campos chalked up the snub to shortsightedness, saying that presenters needed to take more risks, and that audiences will respond. Too much lackluster programming is wrongly attributed to patrons, he says. People who love the arts want to be challenged and engaged, not coddled by the same menu of Broadway musicals and pops orchestras.
"Theater should create dialogue and stimulate," Campos said. "It shouldn't always have to be tits-and-ass and cheesecake and kicking your legs and happy hallelujah American dream."
He wasn't the only artist to throw down the gauntlet. During the January New York conferences, dancer Bill T. Jones reminded presenters that tough themes facilitate community discussion, and that many issues, like race, are as bruised as ever. "We're sick of it, aren't we? But that's the deal," he said in a presentation about his upcoming work, Blind Date. (Jones, meanwhile, faulted artists for their own abstraction, and for letting Hollywood corner the market on traditional and linear narratives). In the audience afterwards, Michael Blachly, director of the performing arts for the University of Florida and a former director at UCLA, agreed. "I wish they would be more confident taking risks," Blachly said of most presenters. Such risks are important, and can lure new audiences to an area – the same audiences that help an area's economics, he said.
But – here's the catch – people love Broadway. And, people love the Pops. And, as presenters will tell you, they're the only two guaranteed moneymakers in the arts-center universe, which is important in an industry where so many shows turn up in the red.
As John Wilkes of Sarasota's Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall says, theater is not removed from the rest of the marketplace. With every show, Wilkes says he must ask, "Is it viable? Is it affordable?" In his job, money is always a factor and art cannot be made in a vacuum. "We do not have the ability to do that," he said.
Judy Lisi of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center is one of those folks who love Broadway; it's the sphere she's most familiar with, she said. But she still tries to bring controversial artists to the smaller of her five theaters, as she has done in the past with artists like Tim Miller and Holly Hughes of the NEA-4. The trick is to balance out the calendar with a variety of programming. The more cutting-edge and controversial works require a more specific advertising effort and an educational dialogue with the audience, Lisi said.
"If you want to have a world-class community, you have to," she said.
Two years ago, Tallahassee-based writer and performer Terry Galloway was asked to participate in the New York conferences. While Galloway spoke as part of a panel of artists with disabilities who aimed for more than feel-good sound bites and imagery, Galloway found herself increasingly frustrated by presenters.
Too often, she said, the presenters seemed to underestimate their audiences, and the result was a type of self-censorship. In her own experience, audiences liked a slate of performances wider than that typically shown by presenters. Her days as a performer at groundbreaking performance space P.S. 122 in New York – and the tours the artists would take as part of P.S.'s vaudeville-like circuit to non-glitzy places like Roanoke, Va. – showed her that audiences were curious. She found that people wanted to see artists like her, an openly lesbian deaf artist, as well as the Blue Man Group, dancer Ron Brown and experimental videos.
"[Presenters] dumb down their choices, choose things they imagine are safe bets, when they themselves would actually choose performances that are more controversial, more problematic," she wrote in an e-mail. "I think that art presenters need to quit fearing for their jobs and do their jobs. Which should be to bring art in all its glorious controversy and incompleteness to the towns where they live."
This article appears in Jan 26 – Feb 1, 2005.