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Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists (ERPA)
If it's broke, fix it!
Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists (ERPA – pronounced ur•pah) tackles tough economic realities on two fronts: inventive public dialogues (AKA Invention Sessions) and an ambitious entrepreneurial lab. Since 2008 ERPA dialogues have engaged more than 500 artists and cultural stakeholders in topics ranging from alternative fundraising tactics, to the romanticization of the starving artist paradigm, to a smackdown exposé on the ‘new’ economy.
The Invention Sessions helped set the stage for a competitive proposal process in November 2008, from which seven projects were selected (out of 116 applicants!) to receive Planning Grants from The Field. Each ERPA artist received a $5,000 stipend and a variety of professional development resources to support their ideas-in-progress. After more than a year of entrepreneurial investigations, their unique approaches to financial stability were presented in a Public Display of Invention at WNYC's The Greene Space - visit the ERPA blog for audio coverage. View clips from the Public Display on the ERPA vimeo channel.
ERPA awards $55,000 to entrepreneurial artists working to catalyze and sustain the cultural economy! View October 2009 Press Release
In September 2009, seven ERPA projects were adjudicated by a panel of veteran arts and business leaders to receive up to $20,000 in funds from The Field. Four of the seven projects received Implementation Awards - individual grants of $10,000 to $20,000 to continue developing and implementing each project under the auspices of The Field. Three projects were selected for Replicability Awards - stipends of $1,500 with additional professional development support from The Field, intended to help document and communicate each project's findings to the greater artistic community.
ERPA Implementation Awardees:
Connie Hall/Conni's Avant Garde Restaurant not only generates an abundance of comic material and great food, but also offers an alternative producing model for artist-driven theater. Through the ERPA program, the actor-run theater company is developing a sustainable business model using income generated by the sale of food and beverages to support its artistic work. www.avantgarderestaurant.com
JoAnna Mendl Shaw/The Equus Projects is developing their Regional Touring Program to include on-site coordinators in four regional hubs throughout the country, enabling each to advocate on the company's behalf and cultivate performance and workshop participation. This program builds upon The Equus Projects' strong national support base, cultivating effective leadership with a handful of key supporters. www.dancingwithhorses.org
Jon Stancato/Stolen Chair Theatre Company is adapting the business plan followed by most Community Supported Agricultures (CSA). Like the CSA model, Stolen Chair will build a membership community that provides 'seed' money for the company's development process and then reaps a year's worth of theatrical harvests. www.stolenchair.org Check out 'Rethinking art economies and arts exchange' Jon Stancato with Andrew Taylor on The Artful Manager
Caroline Woolard/Our Goods proposed an online peer-to-peer barter network where creative people can trade objects, services, and space with each other. Check out the prototype at www.ourgoods.org. There you will find a work dress designed by Caroline waiting to be traded for your skills or artwork!
ERPA Replicability Awardees:
Kahlil Almustafa is bringing performance poetry to his hometown of Jamaica, Queens. Through poetry workshops at high schools, performances at theaters, and Living Room Readings, Almustafa is promoting poetry as a tool for community engagement. www.kahlilalmustafa.com
Nick Brooke composes collages of pop song fragments and sound effects, and then trains live performers to sound like these recordings, while creating intricate theatrical tableaus. He has used ERPA to create a 'micro-commissioning' program, in which small fragments, songs, or vignettes of a larger work are supported by smaller commissions. These micro-commissions are being collaged on the web in an interactive installation, which lets participants converse with the artist, and see their works constantly change. www.nbrooke.com
Rachel Chavkin/The TEAM is launching American Geographic, an initiative that increases national visibility, annual work-weeks for its company members, and forges a country-wide network of audiences and supporters through direct engagement with communities around the nation. The TEAM is re-envisioning itself as a year-round employer and therefore seeking to provide an essential year-round benefit - health insurance - to its part-time employees through corporate sponsorship. The TEAM is developing a model of engagement between small arts companies and large corporations that will build a mutually beneficial bond between the business and arts community and enable future arts companies to pursue essential benefits for part-time employees. www.theteamplays.org
What's next for ERPA?
As the economy continues its rocky road, The Field is committed to short- and long-term solutions and micro- and macro-efforts. We will continue to host Invention Sessions and skill-building programs that help artists revitalize their own economy. Implementation Awardees will engage the community through two public breakout sessions, slated for June and September 2010. In the spring of 2010 we are also launching ERPA services in East Harlem and the Bronx with support from New York State Senator José Serrano.
Visit the ERPA blog for ideas and resources to help revitalize your creative economy, including audio coverage from all Invention Sessions.
More ERPA Backstory...
It Really Does Take a Village
Collaboration, partnership, resource-sharing and mentorship are crucial to ERPA. The Field is also seeking additional funding from individuals, and private and public funders to realize the full impact of ERPA. If you are interested in working with us as an artist, funder, mentor, resource, or press relationship, please contact: Jennifer@thefield.org. Thank you!
Needs Addressed
Rumor has it that 40 artists arrive in New York every day – energetic and ambitious. They work hard, two or three jobs usually. They sleep little. Their income is sparse and their expenses (hopefully) as sparse. It is exhausting, precarious, tenuous, dirty, and overwhelming. But they love making art, so they do it all, day in and day out. They do it all because there is hope for something better: a show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, one job that pays all their rent, a glowing review in The New York Times, a grant from an esteemed foundation, a union card that guarantees them a livable wage, a non-roommate studio on a tree-filled block, the ability to afford dinner and a movie. This “better life” dreamed of by artists, however, is getting harder and harder to attain in New York. The combination of soaring real estate prices, gentrification, overheated competition for press, funders, and gigs, outlandish food and clothing prices all combine to push artists further out - out to the edges of the boroughs, out of economic stability, out of career achievement, and out of hope. The “turnover time” that artists stay in New York or in the arts is decreasing rapidly. Ten years, fifteen years used to be common. Now we see people coming and going in two years, five years. It is just too hard to live here. Why not move to Philadelphia or San Francisco or Berlin or Madrid?
Goals & Objectives – Is there anything new out there?
We need solutions. We need new economic strategies that speak to the exigencies of a modern world that values speed, ease, and gratification. It is not as simple as ‘artists need more money’ or ‘artists need a space of their own’ or ‘non-profits should work like for-profits.’ Something radical needs to change and we say, put it in artists’ hands. They (you, we) are in the trenches, we know what we need, we know how it works. ERPA is not a top-down approach that imposes un-actionable ‘business’ projects on artists. And ERPA is not yet another grant program that diverts artists from their goals or their creative processes. ERPA aims to inspire artists, and business people and government agents and philanthropists, to think and work and live differently in the arts and for the arts. To do this we will beg, borrow and appropriate models, resources and ideas from other sectors that can positively impact the arts community. We will look closely at those around us who are already addressing these challenges and seek inspiration and collaboration from them. Perhaps it’s about micro-financing for the arts, perhaps it’s a NYC “sin tax” funneled to the arts, perhaps it’s an investment fund targeting experimental theater groups, perhaps it’s a DIY web portal that puts touring directly in artists’ hands and removes the middlemen? We don’t know exactly what the answers will be. But we will guide the search and steward the process.
Thank you for your interest. Thank you for your hard work.
ERPA is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2008 New York City Cultural Innovation Fund. This Fund celebrates innovation and trailblazing initiatives which will strengthen the City’s cultural fabric.
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