Last week, the Trump administration released its budget proposal for FY21, and, once again, it proposes shutting down the National Endowment for the Arts. This is the fourth year in a row that the administration has proposed eliminating the NEA and other cultural agencies. It's also the fourth year in a row that a bipartisan Congress has demonstrated its support for the NEA by increasing its budget. The recently passed federal budget gave the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities a $7.25 million increase each for FY20, bringing the funding of both to $162.25 million.
These increases would not be possible without the impact of collective action. At the 2020 TCG Gala: Our Stories, Jon Moscone, the chief producer for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, offered these powerful words:
“Everything we do, conscious or not, serves to advocate for one position or another...We advocate through silence and inaction just as powerfully as when we speak up and we do something.”
Thanks to all you who speak up for the arts as a critical part of your activism. It absolutely makes a difference, and we’re gearing up for more visits to Capitol Hill for Arts Advocacy Day. Email Laurie Baskin if you’d like to know more.
The importance of the NEA, as well as the range of philanthropic support for our theatre field, is never made more clear than when I travel to different communities around the U.S. to see the vibrancy of our theatre community first-hand. Late in January, I was honored to keynote the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference in Dallas, TX. Dallas Theater Center’s artistic director and TCG board member, Kevin Moriarty, introduced and engaged me in a robust Q+A after my presentation. I was able to share key findings from our most recent Theatre Facts report, as well as other observations on the state of the theatre field. The meeting was both edifying and fun, but more than anything, I left feeling renewed by the work that so many Shakespeare theatres are doing. Not only are they keeping the Bard’s work alive, but they are innovating around place, form, and community engagement practice. So many are also working to advance equity within their organizations and communities--and that includes STA itself. Thanks to Patrick Flick, STA’s executive director and to Raphael Parry of TCG Member Theatre, Shakespeare Dallas, for inviting me. While in Dallas, I also had the chance to attend a performance of To Be Young, Gifted, and Black at Jubilee Theatre and to sit down with TCG’s North Texas-based members and catch up on their artistic successes, as well as all of the challenges and inventive solutions associated with running a theatre today.Thanks again to Dallas Theater Center for hosting.
Of course, as a famous Shakespeare monologue begins, “all the world’s a stage.” Those words ring true in a literal sense when I travel across our borders to meet with theatre people from other countries. To that end, I am currently representing the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute at an Executive Council meeting in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates. TCG has been the U.S. Center of ITI for two decades, and, through our Global Theatre Initiative, now shares this role with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown School of Foreign Service. Whenever I travel beyond our borders, I am struck by how much we have in common, and that we are not, as the Bard also wrote, in As You Like It “alone in our unhappiness.” Instead, we share hopes, dreams, artistic ambitions, community connections, political contexts, and, yes, our financial stresses and even days of triumph.
And because we are not alone..there will be much more to report soon!