Ellen Stewart: International Icon

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Contributed by guest blogger of the week, David J. Diamond.

It seems like wherever I travel around the world, everyone knows Ellen Stewart and La MaMa Theatre (except, surprisingly for many places in the United States.) The breadth of her influence is astonishing. She was such an important part of my life as a theatre artist and also as a person; it is still hard to believe that she is gone. As you know, she passed away on January 13, 2011 at the age of 91. She lived every moment of her life to the fullest and she didn’t believe in the words, “It can’t be done.”  Her ceaseless creativity and her loving nature are the things about her I’ll remember the most.
 

Ellen Stewart & David Diamond

My initiation to La MaMa began when I first moved to New York City in 1980 to attend grad school at NYU in the Performance Studies Program. It was a fluke, what brought me to La MaMa at first. But now I think maybe not, maybe I was being directed in ways I didn’t understand. A colleague at NYU, Rick Richardson, asked me to assist him in stage managing a production at a small theatre in the East Village. I barely knew which way East was and I certainly had never heard of La MaMa. The show was T.N.T., the Musical, an EST-spoof, written by Richard Morrock and directed by Frank Carucci.
 

During the show at La MaMa and when it eventually moved to a commercial run Off-Broadway, I spent a bit of time with Ellen, but was completely intimidated by her. Fast-forward to fifteen years later. I had been traveling to Italy regularly by this time and Ellen always invited our groups to visit her at La MaMa Umbria International, the artists’ retreat she created just outside Spoleto, Italy.

When Ellen found this place, it was a wreck. She had it painstakingly restored, renovated and decorated, so that it became what you see today: a modern residence in a 700-year old borgo, with rehearsal studio, art gallery, café, outdoor stage, orchard, vegetable garden and lots of open space. Each room is outfitted with her collection of crafts and art collected during her world travels. There are collections of puppets, dolls, masks, pewter platters, blue glass, posters from productions she directed or produced, artwork done by friends, musical instruments from Africa, Asia, South America, everywhere. It’s like a museum, except for the fact that everything is useful and used.
 

La MaMa Umbria

One year, after spending some time visiting Larry Sacharow, then head of the Theatre Department at Fordham University, who organized a program for actors in Orvieto, Italy, I went to visit Ellen in Spoleto. Since I was working as Executive Director of Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, developing programs for the continuing education of directors was on my mind. I tentatively asked Ellen about the possibility of our producing a summer symposium for directors at La MaMa Umbria, bringing an international perspective on ways to create theatre. Unexpectedly, she said “Yes. Let’s do it!” I was stunned by the quick response. This summer we will be offering our 12th Annual International Symposium for Directors (among other programs) at La MaMa Umbria, thanks to Ellen, La MaMa Artistic Director Mia Yoo and our many collaborators.
 

But how did Ellen Stewart, the girl from Chicago, the first African American fashion designer hired by Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, who never had much interest in theatre, gain such international renown? That’s a story!
 

When Ellen first started Café La MaMa in New York in 1961 in a basement on Second Avenue, international theatre was the last thing on her mind. Her impetus came from her foster brother, Fred Lights and his friend Paul Foster, playwrights who were having difficulty getting produced in New York. Always ready to help a friend, Ellen decided that she would produce the plays herself – never having done anything like that before. She created the first incarnation of La MaMa, “dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theatre.” She produced plays by many unknown writers, such as Tom Eyen, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Jean Claude van Italie, etc. The plays would run at Café La MaMa and she would collect dues from the patrons – pay once a week and you could see all of the plays showing that week.
 

But the playwrights couldn’t get their plays reviewed or published. Ellen was told that if she took the plays to Europe, they would get reviewed and then they could get published back in the States, assuring the writers greater visibility and more productions. Using mostly her own money, Ellen bought plane tickets for her troupe of actors, directors, designers and writers. They traveled across Europe, doing productions and getting reviews.
 

Ellen Stewart and Andre Seban

In the following years, Ellen traveled consistently to Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. She discovered talent wherever she went and invited her discoveries to come to New York. She often found them housing and paid for their meals, so they could work on their productions. Using money from her design business, she “took care” of many artists (both foreign and domestic). Artists such as Andre Serban, Tadeusz Kantor, Jean-Guy Lecat, Jerzy Grotowski, Ryszard Cieslak, Peter Brook – the list goes on, developed long and ongoing collaborations with Ellen and La MaMa. She brought Kathakali dance to New York for the first time; she housed one of the first native American theatre troupes, Pan Asian Rep, HT Chen and Dancers and dozens more.
 

Eventually, La MaMa-style theatres spang up in a dozen countries from New Zealand to Israel. She was appointed an “Officer” in the “Odre Des Arts Et Letters” of the Republic of France and received the Les Kurbas Award for “Distinguished Services to Art and Culture” from the Ukraine. In December 1994 Ellen Stewart was awarded the “Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Rosette” by the Emperor of Japan. She also received the Human Rights Award of the Philippines from President Corazon Aquino among many other awards.
 

Her influence on theatre around the world will continue as La MaMa E.T.C. in New York continues to bring artists to the U.S. and La MaMa Umbria remains a center for artists to grow, study, learn, collaborate and share ideas that challenge what it means to create theatre. Ellen’s love of artists and her unique ability to manifest her vision continues to inpire me and countless others.

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International Theatre Month

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In honor of World Theatre Day (March 27th) we are dedicating March to the  International Theatre community. We have some great bloggers lined up.  Please stop by, ask questions and share your thoughts about how the OOB/Indie theatre community can be a part of the international theatre community. And also check out the NYC World Theatre Day blog.

 

We are very excited that our first blogger for International Theatre Month is David Diamond.

David J. Diamond's current projects include organizing and coordinating (along with Mia B. Yoo) the La MaMa International Symposium for Directors, now entering its 12th year, the La MaMa Playwrights Retreat in its fifth year and Master Acting Workshops. The Programs bring artists from around the world together to exchange ideas and interact creatively through workshops, rehearsals and performances. They take place at La MaMa Umbria in Spoleto, Italy in July and August. David serves on the Steering Committee for Theatre Without Borders and was one of the organizers of the 2010 Conference: Acting Together on the World Stage: Theatre and Peacebuilding in Conflict Zones. Current projects include creating a new theatre piece with musicians and other artists in Kurdistan and working with Ajoka Theater in Lahore, Pakistan on creating a theatre school, stabilizing the Company and actor training. He works with the US Army mentoring directors on Army bases in Europe. David teaches workshops for artists in career development at Yale School of Drama, Columbia University, National Theater Institute, DePaul University, among other colleges. He has an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. 

Do you want to get involved with the World Theatre Day activities here in  NYC?
Productions that have a performance on March 25-28 in NYC and would like to participate can register their production at www.nycwtd.com. To participate in World Theatre Day SPLAT Performances email info@nycwtd.com. For updates and more information check out the website at www.nycwtd.blogspot.com, follow the twitter feed @nycwtd or become a fan on facebook.

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Arts Advocacy Wrap Up

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Wow, we had some really fantastic bloggers for Arts Advocacy Month.

We started out with a bang with Will Maitland Weiss from The Arts & Business Council of New York [ABC/NY], who gave us some important tips on dealing with our city and state representatives and helped us craft our message when communicating with those representatives.

Next Adam Huttler, Executive Director of Fractured Atlas told us that our community can be a powerful special interest group.

Norma P. Munn, Steering Committee Member for the One Percent for Culture Campaign and Chair of the NY City Arts Coalition covered the basics of Arts Advocacy 101.

 

And our key note blogger, Paul Nagle, Executive Director for Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability (ICSCS) covered some important changes in international arts policy that we should all be aware of. He also shared some of the platforms and programs that ICSCS is developing that surrounds some of those policy changes.

There was also a lot of feedback from our community, who left some really good questions and comments.

Thank you all for contributing and we hope to be able to continue these important discussions.

Some Advocacy Items to be aware of:

•  You can still email to your elected officials about the city and state budgets (or consider sending a letter)
• American Alliance for Theatre & Education's Awareness project that asks us all to help spread the word about Theatre In Our Schools Month
• The NEA's recently released Survey of Public Participation in the Arts 
• National Arts Advocacy Day April 4–5, 2011 
• Check to see if your performance venue would qualify for the Tax Abatement proposal and help us gather some important information to help that move on to the next step

In honor of World Theatre Day (March 27th) we are dedicating March to the International Theatre community. We have some great bloggers lined up.  Please stop by, ask questions and share your thoughts about how the OOB/Indie theatre community can be a part of the international theatre community. And check out the NYC World Theatre Day blog.

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Useful News from Across the Pond

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Paul Nagle.

In yesterday’s post, I spoke about the need for our cultural community to participate in international cultural policy discussions.  And today, ICSCS received an email from Dr. David O’Brien of the Department of Culture Media and Sport in the United Kingdom, expressing interest in our work (news travels fast - gotta love the internet!) and bringing our attention to a recent report that his agency produced on strategies for dealing with the quandary of valuing the benefits of the arts Measuring the value of culture: A report to the Department for Culture Media and Sport . 

He also sent along a link for a 1/31/2011 news story, published in a London School of Economics blog called British Politics and Policy at LSE, which I have excerpted below.  It not only illustrates the fact that arts workers around the world have a common struggle, but it points out that we have something to learn from other sectors as well, in this case the environmental movement, which has come up with imperfect, but workable valuations for benefits derived from a healthy ecology. Read…

The arts and cultural sector faces ‘apocalyptic’ cuts in austere Britain. But new ways of looking at economic value can help to make the case for culture
“The prospects for the arts and cultural sector have been described in apocalyptic terms, with cuts to national and local funding for the arts coming at a time when private sector funding and individual philanthropy is dwindling. The reduction of state support has been described by Sir Nicholas Serota as a potential ‘Blizkrieg’ on the traditional mixed economy of arts and cultural funding, and requires rethinking the way arts and cultural funding is valued.”

Lessons from the Green Movement
A recent report by Missions Model Money encourages the sector abandon their suspicions of economics and embrace microeconomic valuation techniques. The Green Movement has taken this approach by developing the field of environmental economics. Running alongside the development of scientific consensus on major environmental issues, environmental economics has made aspects of our natural world that we wouldn’t usually associate with price and money visible in governmental cost benefit analysis. This isn’t to say that all decisions are sensible, or that they reflect the advice of environmental science. But at least the Green Movement now has a way to talk to central government in its own language.

The arts and culture sector can tread the same path as the environmentalists but it will take a bit of a leap of faith. After being told, regular as clockwork since the early 1990s, that the arts and cultural sector needs a new way of ‘proving’ its worth, there’s a danger that a comment like ‘learn to speak economics’ will be greeted with a resigned shrug and seen as another box to be ticked, with another consultant’s fee to be paid. Another issue is that the language of economics isn’t easy: techniques like ‘willingness to pay’ surveys or ‘subjective well-being income compensations’ require expertise to carry out and interpret so they make sense. But they add another layer to the arts and cultural sector’s answer to the economic question.”

So now, through these blogs, I have established some fundamentals for our principles of inquiry.  We at ICSCS believe that in order to create a new and more effective narrative of culture’s critical importance to human society, we need to conduct multiple lines of inquiry:  We need to look beyond our borders; we need to look beyond our sector; we need all sorts of streams of research and data: literature reviews, data assembly, surveys, discussions, ethnography and artistic interpretation, even though we can’t see at this moment how they might all eventually be synthesized into a cohesive argument for the arts.  The first task is to open our minds to possibilities beyond those we have already thought of.  The next task is  to use our talents as artists, our ability to think in non-linear ways, to imagine what does not yet exist and to make visible what is known but not yet seen, in order to decipher together the meanings and applications of all the new ideas we will be discovering together. 

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Make U.S. Arts Policy an International Discussion

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Paul Nagle.

I like to think of myself as an internationalist, and in that role, I have been speaking to my (mostly European) cultural counterparts for years.  Until recently, I have generally hit a brick wall in trying to discuss U.S. Cultural Policy with them.  Their reaction was always the same.  “It is useless to discuss arts funding with you, because it is apples and oranges.  We have always had support for the arts and we will never lose that patrimony.  It’s just too different.”  Hmmm. 

Suddenly, this September, when I was in Berlin, I started hearing a different tune.  Italy’s cultural budget has been obliterated by Berlusconi and Cameron cut the British Council’s budget by 40% shortly after taking office in the U.K.  The Netherlands now has a right-wing coalition government slashing the cultural budget.  (For a take on the situation in the Netherlands, go to our blogsite where ICSCS Associate Director Lise Brenner has posted “Leftist Hobbies (or does the Dutch voter really hate art, Greenpeace, and their local squat café?)”.

So now our European counterparts seem more willing to discuss “Why are artists under attack and how do we respond?” It’s an opening for expanded international engagement, and a reason for artists around the world to work together.  As an example, we were contacted last week by The Internationalists, a coalition of theater directors from around the globe, regarding "Theatre Uncut in New York," a solidarity event in support of Reclaim Productions’ call for a "National Theatre Uprising" which has brought together seven of the UK's leading playwrights in response to the unprecedented public spending cuts in the UK.  On Thursday, March 3rd at 8pm, the 5th Annual NoPe Conference: Global Change in Performance, NoPassport, and The Internationalists in association with INTAR will present an evening of short play readings at INTAR. This event is both in solidarity with UK artists and celebrates the potential of civic responsibility by artists everywhere. It is one among many efforts by hundreds of theatre companies, universities, artists and global supporters who will be staging these shorts throughout March.

But it’s not all about funding.  We are working with Jared Akama Ondieki and CEPACET in Kenya, who is engaging artists in a campaign to peace-build during the upcoming elections.  We are looking for a sister city project in Arizona to pair U.S. and Kenyan artists engaged in promoting civility during election cycles.  Wouldn’t it be great to have the two campaigns helping each other and comparing notes?   We are also working with Shalom Neuman , visual artist, in the Czech Republic, who is converting a 10^th century basilica in Bohemia into a cultural center celebrating all of the ethnic communities that have called the region home. The center will be a locus for understanding as two towns create a repatriation campaign for Jews and Germans who lost their properties or were driven out as a result of World War II.  And we are working with Todd Lester of freeDimensional an organization that has created a network of arts facilities around the world that work to provide short and long-term safe haven to artists who have become political refugees (which happens way more often than it should).

As funding paradigms are collapsing globally under the crush of the baby boomer numbers, and as people around the world gain new understanding of how arts and culture can lift conversations about global challenges, we have new openings for international cultural policy discussions.  Exposure to ideas from around the world will strengthen all our investigations, and spur expanded thinking on what is possible anywhere. The time for provincial thinking on cultural policy has passed.

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The Basic Arts Advocacy Platform of ICSCS

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Paul Nagle.

 It’s great to be in the Guest Blogger clean-up position.  I’ve read all of the ITF guest blogs for advocacy month and each one has had very valid things to say.  If, as we know, the arts are critically important to communities, and if we have such smart people in the forefront of the charge advocating for the arts, why do we feel like the proverbial hamster in the wheel about all of this?  How do we keep coming back to fighting for tiny restorations to tiny budget allocations that bear no real relationship to the current impact numbers (by far too low anyway in my opinion) that represent the benefits that the arts bestow on society?  At ICSCS (The Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability), we believe there are two key issues:  that the arts are undercounted and isolated.

 

Some great work has been done in the last few years, particularly by Randy Bourscheidt and the studies he produced through the Alliance for the Arts.  But the arts remain undercounted.  Economic metrics, at their best a partial and inferior measure of art’s value, still fail to take into account the employment of many many individual artists and freelance creative workers.  We do not have a sufficient method to account for the intangible benefits of the arts.  Valuing doesn’t take into account value of mission, or value of service to the community.  We don’t have an effective way to present the macroeconomic benefits of the arts, even though we know that urban centers cannot be competitive these days without a healthy cultural sector.    

 

Quantifying these deeper values of the arts has been elusive and hard, but that thinking, that new knowledge is out there.  It’s really at the tip of our fingertips.   How do we get at it? How do we achieve that needed innovation that ties it all together into a cohesive but expansive narrative? Open up the conversation; both who is in on the discussion, and the range of topics to be considered. Culture is a broad topic and it deserves broad complex consideration.   New technologies that are highly interactive with maximum efficiencies can facilitate discussions and inquiry involving the entire cultural community.  There is a lot of untapped expertise out there in the trenches. 

 

But even if we achieve that expanded grassroots discussion within the cultural community, the arts could remain isolated.  For some reason, we have been repeating many of the same rhetorical mistakes for 40 years now.  The political discussion has moved very little in real terms and is presently moving backward again.  At ICSCS, we believe that part of our mistake has been sitting in a room full of arts people, telling ourselves how special and important we are.  That doesn’t necessarily fly so well with the greater community, especially once you leave the cultural cocoon of New York City. 

 

In fact, most of the problems we face are not so different than those of most of our neighbors.  And the really big issues like climate change and worldwide recessions affect us even though, not because, we are artists.  It must become clear to the greater community that the health of the cultural sector and the health of the community are interdependent, not because we say it is, but because they see that it is so.

 

That is why ICSCS will concentrate on creating conversations and initiatives between artists and advocates from other sectors over the value of art and the role of artists in addressing shared issues of sustainability.  There are networks all over the globe of people who are not artists, and yet who understand the deep relationships between art and culture and a sustainable life.  It’s a matter of creating the synapses of good will and unity of purpose that will make the connections among these networks. 

 

We are artists in trouble, in a world full of trouble.  We are artists with new ideas in a world full of new ideas.  If we can open up the conversation, not only within the cultural community, but beyond its borders, then we can tie our fate as artists to the fate of the greater community.  If we can have these conversations not only with our friends in New York City, but with our allies across the country and in Berlin and Poland and Kenya, then for arts advocacy, I believe it is a game-changing moment of opportunity.

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