 Welcome to the Martin E. Siegel Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center CUNY and to Prelude 21. Start making sense. It is our annual Theatre and Performance Festival celebrating the work of New York theatre artists of ensembles and it's hard enough in normal times to create work for the stage and for spaces inside and outside but at the time of Corona we all are faced with exceptional challenges and we are here to celebrate again the extraordinary achievements that come out of the New York Theatre community. It is time I think and we feel to start making sense to ask questions why are we making theatre but also how are we producing it and for whom and this is a great investigation again into the mechanics of making art in New York City and we also invited theatre ensembles from around the U.S. from Detroit and Cincinnati and Lewis and Philadelphia New Orleans to join us and this will be extraordinary look into what is on the minds of artists right now we also have many panel discussions we have an award which we're giving out to honor outstanding members of the New York Theatre community so I would like to all of you to join in and get an insight of what is happening. Welcome. Welcome. Hello everybody. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Hillary Miller. Welcome to then now considering 1970s New York City and performance today. We're very excited to be here at the Prelude Festival 2021 for this panel discussion. Before I introduce our panelists I just wanted to very quickly give a little bit of a background of the genesis of this panel and why we're here today why we thought that this would be an exciting addition to the lineup of Prelude events. When the pause occurred when the lockdown occurred in March of 2020 I had actually been teaching a New York City in 1970s class theater class New York City in 1970s at the Graduate Center actually where I'm live recording live from now and it was a really uncanny experience to have the to have COVID begin at a moment when I was studying and investigating closely theater during the 1970s with a group of students because it was pretty quickly that I saw a lot of the similar language and a lot of the rhetoric that was occurring in articles about what was happening in the city very quickly started to sound like what we had been reading so there were questions about whether the wealthy fleeing New York would irreparably damage the arts. There were questions about whether neighborhoods needed to just be completely rethought as things shifted. There were questions about whether tourist activity would irreparably damage the progress of the arts and the creativity of the artists living here. There were questions about whether artists could remain here so a lot of the questions that were very quickly bubbling to the surface at least within the arts performance community started to sound familiar and that was also on the very, very essential level of can artists survive? Can they have what they need not only to make work but also to live? So as all of this was occurring I was also seeing more and more a kind of hearkening back to the 1970s as a potential moment of inspiration also and it was I think it was actually Jerry Seinfeld's article in the New York Times that he wrote. He wrote an opinion piece arguing it was called so you think New York is dead and the very first paragraph of the article essentially retold the story of him moving to the city in 1976 when it was an incredibly difficult flawed place but he argued there was nowhere he would rather be. So in that sense the city was positioned as kind of inspiration for we had a moment that we could look back to for the recovery. So as I was kind of taking in all of these different notes and ideas for why and in different ways people were essentially returning to this decade when thinking and worrying and problem solving around the city and New York and its arts Frank and I were discussing Frank Hedgeko and I were discussing this question of is there a way to create a historical perspective on a prelude panel that would allow us to draw some insights to contemporary performance today? So the idea that we can do that today and kind of take a step back and say we're just going to look at this discrete period of time and look at what was happening in the city what changed in the city and hopefully see what can really profitably be called from the research that we've been doing whether it be as cautionary tales or as a sense of legacy or just inspiration new perspectives. So for that reason I'm very excited to have our panelists here today and very excited to learn from them and from their work on the decade. So we have with us today panelists Julia folks is going to be speaking first and then Karen Jaime will be speaking after and so and if anyone has tuned in also expecting to hear Ryan Donovan unfortunately he could not be with us today so we are going to proceed with these two panelists and I'm very excited to hear their work. So I'll first have the opportunity to introduce Julia folks is on the faculty of the new school and is the author of A Place for Us West Side Story in New York that's from 2016 to the city urban photographs of the New Deal from 2011 and modern bodies dance and American modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey from 2002 and most recently realizing the new school lessons from the past 2020 and that is with Mark Laramore she curated the exhibition Voice of My City Jerome Robbins and New York from 2018 to 2019 which hopefully you didn't miss and appeared in Neta Urashami Apologies for pronunciation para modernities as a writer speaker on Bob Fosse Julia is a 2021-22 fellow at the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and is at work on a book about the rise of New York as as a capital of culture in the 20th century and we are so excited Julia to have you with us today thank you. Did you want to introduce Karen or I'm going to go? Oh I apologize yes I was going to I will introduce Karen at the at the onset of her presentation great. So I'm delighted to be here with you and thank the Segal Center and Hillary for the invitation to speak and so I was hoping to drop some slides so that you have something to look at lovely there we go I think can everybody see so I from this prompt which is I think such a great one to be thinking about the 1970s in the context of today I really appreciated the way that Hillary spoke about the kinds of things that are echoing from that moment and I think she's quite right and I look forward to sort of deeper conversation I'm in the midst of writing a history of New York City's cultural affairs cultural activities since the 1940s and the 1970s really do stand out the fiscal crisis is the one that seems to have impacted the arts even more than many other crises during the last 75 years World War II McCarthyism the war in Vietnam even the terrorist attack on 9-11 while the nation and the city may be part of national tragedies such as the war in Vietnam it's when the city becomes a less desirable place to live that we reach a crisis it seems to me that the arts are a lens by which we gauge this livability I think is just one indication of how tied they have become to the city itself it's easy to spout numbers in support of this but I'll mention only one by 1960 two-thirds of the nation's artists lived in New York City while artists have dispersed to more places since then New York City is still the home to the widest variety of the arts in which people work many you New Yorkers are artists even more New Yorkers participate in the arts whether as a viewer a dabbler or a professional the arts are part of our everyday life in the city I credit this partly to the initiation and consolidation of the first municipal cultural policy in the country in New York Mayor Robert Ragnar ran his reelection campaign in 1960 with a promise to support the cultural activities of the diverse array of peoples who lived here I believe this was a reaction to the enormous undertaking of the development of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arch which had just broken ground in 1959 the largest performing arts complex in the country in the midst of the largest urban renewal project in the country Lincoln Center swallowed up a huge amount of resources including federal state and local monies in addition to foundation individual and corporate support a white travertine marble mausoleum many thought to the traditional elite performing arts of Europe opera symphony ballet and theater Mayor Wagner could not ignore the inherent imbalance in such giving to the arts in the city of immigrants from around the world and migrants from Puerto Rico and the American South in particular so acting on his campaign promise he established an office of cultural affairs in 1962 that is very much still with us the office really struggled to deliver on Wagner's promise though with an unsalaryed executive at the top it was largely devoted to ceremonial affairs and to supporting the powerful people who barked the loudest mainly those at Lincoln Center and Joseph Papp the next mayor John Lindsay had more success in broadening what was possible while public monies overwhelmingly supported large conventional cultural institutions which long had separate lines in the city's budget cultural affairs got a bit of discretionary spending starting in the late 60s and expanding significantly in the 1970s and they turned it over primarily to organizations and initiatives that moved the arts into parks onto streets and beyond Manhattan this is the legacy that I want to consider in relation to our current moment moving the arts outdoors small amounts of funding had real impact the new Harlem cultural council created a jazz mobile led by the pianist Billy Taylor and a dance mobile led by the choreographer Elio Pomari they were so successful that a year later the council planned it to add an opera mobile a drama mobile a science mobile and a puppet mobile none of those came into existence an indication of the ongoing fight for any kind of funds but both jazz mobile and dance mobile continued and and still in revised form to this day the idea of taking the arts to parks and streets was not new necessarily street theater had been around at least since the 1950s and Papp had instituted the idea with Shakespeare in the park by the late 50s what was new was sanctioning the idea with city funds and initiative arts offered outdoors spread in the 1970s affirming the idea and re making enacting the idea that the arts were everywhere I have a slide missing so I'll go on let me just see if I put it in the wrong place nope it's not coming up okay so one of the best examples of this is a picture that I don't have but it's a festooned festival truck that the cultural affairs department made the department outfitted a truck with decorations art supplies platforms refreshments a sound system and then traveled to six neighborhoods in one summer for instance from the Lower East Side to Crown Heights in Brooklyn and Spanish Harlem a splashy brochure promoting the venture claimed that these festivals interrupted the ordinary work a day patterns of life and inspired people to respond freely and with imagination to their surroundings it claimed an artist was employed to help the process work with the community for a few weeks before the truck came and those artists would break down that limits of habit they said and stimulate participation with a free spirit even the white behemoth soon followed suit Lincoln Center began sponsoring arts in its outdoors in the plaza first in 1971 a street theater festival and by 1974 the beginning of the ongoing out-of-doors festival artists be too began conceiving their work outdoors as well the example I like to bring up is the one of twilight tharp who conceived of dances in parks museums gymnasiums as well as conventional proscenium stages for the first 10 years of her career from the mid 60s to the mid 70s a day-long performance series of performances on May 28th 1971 began with more formal dance in Fort Tyron Park at 5 a.m. in the morning with three dancers including tharp and then the trio traveled to battery park for a noontime performance of drills accompanied by 14 student dancers to a high school marching band from Brooklyn and then the day ended at city hall when the three dance to sitar players conjuring up the grandeur of performances in Indian palaces in our own municipal palace so you know one of the questions then sort of is what did moving creative expression to the outdoors really mean so there's some argument for that that observers became participants in a different way as the brochure for the festival truck put it they offer the energy of their attention they provide the human envelope the setting for celebration the idea of who were involved in the arts encompassed not only those who were deliberately viewing the performance I would argue but also passers-by the only slightly interested the older woman looking out the window on the street expanding the idea of who might the arts before but also who might they be operating with or participating with government officials and others touted that this participation activated democracy and even more expanded it to a wider group of people but there's no clear way to prove that cultural policy existed on the hope that all different kinds of participation with the arts expanded thought expression and creativity if people could imagine worlds they could be more active in the world immediately around them there were more cynical intentions as well upheavals in the city were occurring with rapid intensity in response to the dramatic different kinds of events that were occurring in the nation at large and in the city itself government officials saw the arts and parks and arts in the parks as a way to diffuse conflict conflict and deescalate conflict the the arts were viewed as a kind of release valve capable of lowering the building pressure in the fight for belonging and thriving in the city but as urban scholar Mariana Mogilevich argues putting the arts into public spaces does not necessarily mean that they are democratic or even public taking into account the myriad definition of those words often the arts are even just ignored outside or easily dismissed um so one of the questions is is the is the relation to democracy that choice that choice of ignoring what's right in front of you but a more prosaic vision of the democratization of the arts in this period is the general support of public funds even it's very small really the specific effort to use those funds more evenly across the city in geographic terms even though still the bulk remained in Manhattan and then the recognition of artistic works of various ethnic groups limited as all that was what i think is more sure is that arts and artists in more locations and in key sites such as central park or in city hall reinforce the role of the arts in our daily and symbolic experiences of living in the city the arts become both fixed and happenstance poured in concrete in the halls and theaters and sculpture around us and ever-vescent and random through encounters in festivals on streets and activities in the park so today the connection i see is you know what's often touted about new york city's cultural policy of the 1970s is the rise of the argument for arts and culture in economic terms and that certainly is something that we've lived with since the 1970s and very much you know with a nod to martin seagull the the benefactor of the seagull theater because he really articulated and argued for and convinced policymakers of this idea that arts and culture are a dominant industry in new york city and that we shoot ourselves in the foot according to him uh if if we're not in fact investing the very small amounts and expanding the investment that we have in the arts because they return as he said four to one you know you put one dollar in your get four back from the kind of economic boost that comes from the arts but i'd like to point to this other legacy i think of the 1970s as much as that may still be with us as well the idea of culture paying i think that the arts every day are when this really begins to be instantiated in many ways in our in our cultural life in new york city and that's another long-standing legacy focusing i think attention not on visitors and tourists as sort of the economic argument often relies upon but on city residents and this very much of course also draws tourists to new york city martin seagull like to say that people don't come to new york city to ski or to scuba dive they come to walk they come to witness the theater of the streets as much as that inside on the stages so in early 2020 this was my street this was musicians you know living on the block put up an impromptu concert right across from where i lived and they did it for the people on the block and then now they play regularly on the weekends on open street around the corner from me so when the pandemic shut down theaters and indoor spaces the streets opened up for our need and desire for creativity and expression so for one i think the continuation of open streets is a good thing and a and an attention to residents in a way that i think is important to think through the impact of the arts today not just as to who might come to the theaters from elsewhere but actually who lives here and participates and wants this it's choosing to live here very much because of the theater of the streets thanks excellent thank you so much for that um uh there's so much there and i'm excited to discuss it more after we hear from our next presenter panelist um who i'm excited to introduce um karen haime uh phd's assistant professor of performing and media arts and latino latina studies at cornell university and accomplished open spoken word performance artist karen served as the host curator for the friday night poetry slam at the world-renowned new yorkan poets cafe from 2003 to 2005 and in her book the queer new yorkan racialized sexualities and aesthetics in lois cyda coming out 2021 uh maybe it's already out oh we're coming out yes it is okay already out congratulations this can double as a as a book celebration um uh she argues in it for a re-examination of the cafe as a historically queer space uh karen's poetry is included in the best of panic and vivo from the east village flicker and spark a queer anthology of spoken word and poetry in a special issue of sinister wisdom a multicultural lesbian literary and arts journal out latina lesbians and in the anthology latinas struggles and protest in 21st century usa and i'm excited to introduce karen hi may thank you thank you so much let me get on to are we able to see the powerpoint yes i won't know i guess someone will tell me if yeah oh perfect okay good afternoon i wanted to just start off and thank um frank the seagull center hillary ton v and jackie for all of their help with this and for the invitation um it's my pleasure to join you here today in order to discuss the legacy of the new yorkan poets cafe both as a performance base and as the site for the emergence of what i termed the new yorkan aesthetic for those unfamiliar with the cafe it was founded in 1973 during the heyday of new york's portorecan community's nationalist liberation movements the name of the cafe specifically includes the term new yorkan initially a pejorative term that was directed at co-founders miguel algarine and miguel pinero following a reading in puerto rico were due to their usage of english rather than spanish in their writing they were deemed less authentically portorecan so here we see the original spelling um the negative epitaph which was new york weekend and new yorkan their appropriation of it um algarine and pinero reappropriate the term new yorkan spell it phonetically and claim it as a form of empowerment ultimately including it in the name of their poetry cafe located in lois cyda i use the term lois cyda deliberately rather than um referring to it as the lory side or alphabet city or the east village because lois cyda is an ethnic enclave within the boundaries of the lory side primarily inhabited by new yorkans and other immigrant communities prior to gentrification circa late 1980s through algarine's and pinero's reclamation and their inclusion of it in the cafe's name new yorkan with an uppercase n comes to signifying ethnic political and cultural identity signifying portorecan community culture and struggle in new york city in the 1970s in my book which just came out in june the queer new yorkan racialized sexualized in aesthetics in lois cyda i trace the continuing impact of the cafe on new york city performance that which begins in the 1970s by focusing on the connection between queerness and the performances happening in the cafe since its founding in turn i argue that the cafe's history is queer not just in terms of sexualities but also in terms of how performance practices developed there that challenged notions of low versus high art rejected constructions of what constituted quote unquote proper writing challenged the politics of authenticity as they retained to ethnic identity and in turn devised artworks challenging racism colonialism and poverty moreover i examine how the performances occurring inside the new yorkan were informed and affected by the socio-political and economic changes occurring outside of it so if we look at this image this is an early image of the new yorkan around the 1980s followed by this image and this is the new yorkan post cafe that i first walked into in the late 1990s and then we have the final image which is of the current new yorkan although that might change a bit since the cafe we could talk about this later since the cafe has received a grant to develop unused areas of the space it's significant to mention it's significant to mention that the changes occurring outside of the cafe due to a renewed economic investment in the neighborhood alongside the popularity of poetry slam as a performance genre lead to a change in the people both attending and performing in the space resulting in the space or in the cafe rather no longer operating as a primarily local space so sorry about that for you for those of you that aren't familiar poetry slam is a three-round poetry competition consisting of five poets the poets are judged by five sets of randomly selected groups of judges on a scale of one to ten including decimal points one's the lowest score ten is the highest sorry everyone i think we're having some technical difficulties we will look into this and resume my back i think i'm back you are okay um how far back should i go uh just the just starting the poetry slam slide is perfect okay so quick recap and this reminds me of my days hosting the poetry slam at the new yorkan for those not familiar with the poetry slam it's a three-round poetry competition it consists of five poets the poets themselves are judged by five sets of randomly selected groups of judges on a scale of one to ten including decimal points one's the lowest score possible ten is the highest highest and the lowest scores are dropped and so the highest possible score you can receive is a 30 this is important when we think about performance um specifically because oftentimes the performances are devised to try to get the highest score possible so it's less about content and more about form um and so there's this increasing popularity at the new yorkan which informs the type of performances happening inside of the cafe um also more people are attending performances at the cafe um because of the popularity of poetry slam so the cafe no longer operates as a primarily local community space this move away from the local also impacts the term new yorkan how it was used and more importantly who it referred to so while new yorkan is an ethnic marker initially used to refer to people born and or raised in new york city of puerto rican it started being used to refer to poets and performers affiliated with the cafe new yorkan became both ethnic marker and arguably a brand which for me has always been problematic i think apart because of my relationship with the cafe um i began performing there shortly after graduating college in the late 1990s and eventually served as the host and i had a personal i developed a personal connection not just with the space but with the new yorkan community although i'm not ethnically new yorkan and so in turn i always questioned whether there was a way to recognize contemporary poets and performers who align themselves with the original mission and politics of the cafe what about them right who weren't necessarily puerto rican moreover what about queerness and how did it impact the type of work produced as an answer to these questions i proposed the development in the 1990s of a lower case new yorkan aesthetic um that queer's fixed definitions of new yorkan identity by recognizing and including queer poets and performers of color whose writing and performance build upon the politics inherent in the cafe's founding extending them within loycius changing demographics the new yorkan aesthetic operates as a queer artistic practice that facilitates my tracing of the cafe's queer history a queer history that is intertwined with the spatial politics that help engender racialized sexualities that play out in poetry hip hop theater drag camp theatrics and audio visual cultural production so as such in my book i document the interventions made by queer and trans artists of color at the cafe beginning with the writing performance and sexuality of cafe co-founder and here i am actually going to switch out of my ipads so that so can everybody hear me got it um so i start off looking at the um the work of uh co-founder and we get a dinero downtown his body was found all over town seeking a car seeking seed calls found in the potter's fields of an old d found in the barries with the dbt his legs were left in vietnam his arms were bound and sing sing his scalp is our nixon's belt his blood paints the streets of the ghetto his eyes are still looking for jesus to come down for some clouds and make everything all right when jesus died in attica i further away regi cabecco the governments asks me to check one if i want money i say how could you ask me to be one race i stand proudly before you a fierce filipino who knows how to belt hard gospel songs played through african drums in a catholic mass and loving the music the suffering beats and lashes from men's eyes in the capital streets uh an event that used to occur in the new year at the new rican poets cafe from 1998 to 2008 entitled the glam slam which was a combination of a poetry slam competition and a harlem drag ball so in this clip we'll definitely see a someone who continues to be a part of sort of downtown new york city performance um downtown new york city performance community and culture so this is lovely okay next i want to introduce to you our five celebrity judges who will be handing out the trophies tonight and first off we have gossip columnist diva she's a legend and her name is michael mousseau finally the work of black um so i highlight queerness in the space and as part of the cafe's history because in making visible queer sexuality sexual identities and performative strategies as present if included at the cafe since its inception i show that the changing demography demography and culture of loisida from a predominantly immigrant racial minoritarian working class space to a to a more gentrified white middle class neighborhood also led to the queering of the term neoregan with the shift in the populace of loisida represented in the aesthetic practices that then emerged at the cafe yet the aesthetic used by these poets no longer functions as culturally specific it now refers to a diasporic performance modality with the cafe as its physical home space or symbolic site of origin this then becomes the enduring legacy of the new york and poets cafe specifically how its history as a performance space that is historically grounded continues to inform contemporary performance practices um thank you very much excellent thank you yay thank you so much um that was wonderful so i think that there are a lot of different directions um we can go in i will throw out uh one thing that is bubbling to the surface for me and where we can just grab hold of it or move on to something else um one thing you know um karen you brought up the local um which was i know threaded through julia's discussion as well um and it's something that i would love to be able to um hear you both talk a little bit more about this relationship between uh local neighborhoods and their institutions and if we're able to also think a little bit about the work that's happening also then on the stage so as an example could be you know i was thinking about um an institution like the brooklyn academy of music bam during the 1970s and how much it was at least in in my understanding really doing a little bit of everything trying to expand its mission as um a kind of stage for the neighborhood even though it was also at this very same time involved in a lot of initiatives that now as we look back on it seems to have been also a driver of gentrification in the area so it creates a bit of attention for some of these local institutions and so i wonder if we could look at the new yorican or julia if you have any examples um of how these institutions at the time um were both um embracing their local neighborhood in really specific ways but maybe as you were mentioning uh karen getting further from its mission of the local neighborhood performance so i'm i'm interested in just any of these contradictions of the local and the space that might be coming out of the discussion yes yeah please um i mean thank you so much that's a great question so i'm trying to wrap my head around it so this is going to be like extreme consciousness thought answer process and thinking about the new yorican so it starts out local right and it closes in 82 because the roof caves in you know the building itself was originally a space used by ellen steward of la mama as a space to you know jazz musicians coming in to perform this is where she picked them up and they were so and and there was this plan of turning it into like uh quote-unquote like hispanic theater right like she was friends with algarine Miguel algarine so there's there's this relationship to that so it closes in 82 doesn't reopen in 88 until Miguel pineros demise and it's uh the idea for reopening actually comes from bob holman right who is the owner and the founder of the bowery poetry club and he's the person that introduces poetry slam to the cafe and at first the poetry slam at the cafe is not necessarily drawing all of these audiences right like when regi cabico first enters the space he's like you could see tumbleweed down the street along with the syringes like that's that's what he was walking into you know circa 1996 we see this change happen with sol williams um independent film entitled slam and this documentary slam nation by paul devlin who shines a light on this group of poets not just at the new reekin but the national competition itself and that group that team from the new reekin included not just sol williams but um and he recently just passed away craig mom's grant um actor who's part of labyrinth theater who was on the television show eyes was on uh i can't remember the other show but so you have this you know this this increased focus on the new reekin and it's like oh this poetry slam thing could actually lead to me having a career doing something else and as actors right specifically you think of someone like bocia also so you see this this leg is this this interest bubbling up so all of a sudden people from outside of the community are attending there are other events occurring at the cafe that people from the community continue to attend but now there's there's different money coming in there's a different community that's interacting with it you have the proximity of nyu and nyu students making that a place to go on friday night and then buying up a real estate pushing people out all of a sudden the cafe becomes this site of sort of yes it was this counter-cultural history but it's also this cool place that if i go then i'm i'm i'm part of that i i'm enacting or performing this sort of counter-cultural identity whether or not i know the history of the space whether or not i'm invested in those politics so the space adapts in some ways by continuing to you know the the poetry there are people that do stuff and that perform the poetry said that you know as i mentioned in the book are really committed and invested in the history right so it's it's balancing that out and balancing how you can continue to have this space as a site for the community to feel a part of and i mean you have to make money because the rent has gone up so they're all of these things and what does it mean also when we think about legacies 1970s new york we think of 1970s performers how many of them are still alive right like the you know me get out of that thing as a founder of the new york and poets cafe just passed last december so that part of the legacy then is like things there's there's you know environmental shifts there's shifts in terms of people there's shifts in terms of what species mean and whether or not you know the evolution includes the surrounding community but what does it mean when the surrounding community itself changes right like it's a community starts out as a local community space but what happens when the community around it can't afford to live there anymore i don't know if that answers your question but that was okay i'll just jump in and off that i think that the new york and cafe is such a good example of the ways in which and you know success leads to some problems and you know but but one of the things i think that is that you brought up karen that i think is so important is to understand it as a platform right it's a platform it it becomes an institution in and of itself that leads to a kind of global platform at least a national platform or at least an entertainment platform you know for a lot of people to really um you know become successful in one way or the other and and you know hilly bringing up bam is such an interesting example because it isn't it was an organization i think maybe it still is but it more clearly was an organization that had one foot that said we want they were really worried about getting crowds they were really worried about people coming taking the train to brooklyn in the 1970s how do we convince people to do that so they were very much involved in what we now call gentrification efforts um but at the same time they recognize that that community also deserve to be there um in the theaters as well so they were very bifurcated i think in what they offered they offered the next wave festival of european avant-garde weird art if you will though to try to lure Manhattanites out to brooklyn and then they offered and still do the african dance festival every may that became and still is dance africa that is a is an enormous directly connected to the community that was there more so the Caribbean and african population that has now moved further out of brooklyn but still come back very dedicated to that particular festival um so it's really trying to do a little bit of both which i think is is is is a kind of reckoning in some of the ways that you were talking about Karen of of a kind of if you have a legacy how do you stand on it and utilize it you know um because it seems to me that it's a place like the new york and cafe should stand on it you know should be um proclaiming what um was possible there and is still possible there and and could be to a much wider audience than the local community and at the same time i think it's really important to to look around you directly and figure out how you connect to the people who live directly it seems to me that that's one way to think about being a healthy institution in new york city the change is relentless maybe maybe i mean we say that a lot of things are stuck perhaps too um but i i think that it's important to recognize that institutions need to be relevant to where they are to where they live as much as they have to understand how they provide a platform for lots of people to get far beyond that particular neighborhood in that particular place wonderful thank you both um and and directly related i think is this question of institutional sustainability and and it feels that um you know from from my research one of this one of the frustrating things is that often in the the organizations that struggled the most in the 70s were the smaller ones doing the most vibrant you know work directly related to communities um many of those smaller theater organizations then couldn't survive the 70s for all of the pressures that we know and um at moments right now it can feel a little bit uncomfortable like is the same thing happening you know we just read about the lark closing that was a major playwright development program that closed and many we can all name organizations arts organizations that closed during this 2020 2021 time period and i'm i'm curious sort of thinking about the 70s how we think about institutional sustainability then and i wonder julia you mentioned budget um and the sort of very different place that they thought about arts funding at the time um then we do now today which is which i think is generally great um but also for the new yurican i mean the brass tax of how an organization like that is able to bounce back after for example a roof caving in or something um when does that money come like for lamama when does it come from the ford foundation and when is it actually the city making the investment and saying this is absolutely part of the lifeblood of the city and so i'm just curious to hear if there are thoughts circulating about um any lessons that we can take from let's say budgetary changes that might have happened in the 70s julia you know as you were discussing uh more of a shift more maybe geographically you know money shouldn't just be in manhattan um if there's like a specific something that we can hang our hat on when we think about organizations and sustainability because my my i'll just say i asked the question because i have a sort of secret hope that right now we we are talking so much more about what organizations need to keep their doors open today and because of the moment that we're in and i don't know if that's going to lead to real concrete change but my hope is that it will so i'm curious if if you have um just any thoughts about um this question of real like the the real financial sustainability for organizations um how you look back at that and its relationship with the cultural policy that you've been studying and investigating well i'm more hopeful too you know in the sense that um you know the federal government is under this administration is providing more money than we expected a year ago um and i think that um i think that the recognition on the fact of you know new york state senators um even debilazio um you know that the arts what i what i see a little bit of a shift is that yes we're open for business the new the city is trying broadway is back and it's everybody has to come and you know it's still got that kind of um i love new york kind of promotional uh push a little bit but i would say that it is also it also has artists live here and the city artists core um that the cultural affairs program i think is a good one is this like this these are people who live here and they need the money now and let them produce something you know the way that i see it anyway is that it's fairly open it's fairly it's not a ton of money um but the other thing and i know that this comes up in your work too hillary is that the other thing that i like to point out about the 1970s is Manhattan Plaza which is subsidized housing for artists for theater artists in particular and that opened in the mid 70s section eight housing um if we could just figure out how to house people the wide variety of people um that are being priced out just because they don't happen to have a lot of money or they are not in a field that gives them a lot of money in terms of their income if we could recognize the vitality of the city depends on the variety of people who are able to live here um you know i want to believe that we could get somewhere by focusing on housing literally as housing and that artists would benefit from that um if and even more particularly maybe we could figure out how to do another project like Manhattan Plaza where we could you know we have very few examples and they've been enormously successful the west bath and uh Manhattan Plaza they're not many others that i can think of i don't know if i'm missing but those are sort of the two and you know 1960s 1970s not since then um and yet they have been enormously important for a lot of working artists lives so i'd love to see that yeah i'm trying to think i know i have a couple of friends who are artists who've managed to had to get on a list to get the department in the middle of like um but i think something more sustainable on a larger scale um i think is important i mean i like thinking about so the new rican receives a five point three million dollar grant from the city in 2013 for repairs and renovations and you know really changing the space but tying that into your point julia that i think that's fantastic in terms of maintaining the space but what does it mean to maintain a space where the artists aren't the the the sort of artists that are part of a legacy of art making not you know what not and i'm drawing here from like sarah shulman's gentrification of the mind when i'm like but thinking about people that are coming as like trust fund kids or like i want to be an artist but that that's not that's not the type of work and that it's not a knock on them it's not a personal indictment it's to say that there needs to be a space in the city for people that don't necessarily have the financial backing right like that that safety that safety security net that i think really made art what it was and the artistic community gave the artistic community it's it's not just vibrancy but you know the radicalism of it right was i'm going to be an artist i'm not going to have that net i'm going to take this risk you know that scene and the type of work that's produced right it's not i don't have this safety net that's gonna if i mess up it's okay and i have this inside track to you know to moments no you you came here and you know there was abc real and then all of these different pyramid club that close so it's sustaining the venues yes that's important but it's also reconfiguring or the city so that artists aren't priced out so that they can use those venues because now once the spaces are renovated who's using them right who's creating art in them does that not also inform the politics of the spaces themselves so now it's it's a nice shiny new eurek and for a nice shiny new yorkers that are that just it for me that's that's a problem and that it's a tension it's a tension i'm happy with the renovations let's get us new ceilings let's get us wider doorways but let's also make it affordable so that artists creating work that are really challenging you know boundaries that they're able to live here yeah that's a great example of what i was asking about um in terms of allocation of funds and and what we're supporting um and you know it also reminds me there was a sort of period where um it felt like every week there was another opinion piece like about a year ago about using the wpa arts programs as sort of inspiration for right now um which i think is wonderful like i find many of those programs very inspiring too um but i you know i know a number of people who are looking at the the set up funding ceta i think that's how you say the acronyms or maybe you say ceta i don't hear it out loud a lot um but there have been a ceta but you're absolutely right that's a great example ceta yeah um and there is as far as i know actually a small group of artists who got this federal ceta funding during the 1970s um and this was a bipartisan um essentially a jobs training bill that um i i don't have the exact statistics in front of me so i don't want to say the numbers but employed thousands of artists across the country and in the 70s and what it did very differently was that it actually paid not the organizations themselves so rather than employing the artist directly it paid the organizations to hire the artists and there's something in that model that is very powerful for what you were just mentioning karen because it then filtered onto the stage so there were a couple for example lamama had um quite a bit of ceta funding and did uh one of its projects was an enormous faust uh that pulled from the neighborhood in order to cast this incredible faust production and just um employed a ton of people through it so um i'm excited about um the sort of push because since there are still again to your point karen about these legacies and losing legacies there are still a number of people who are saying i during the 1970s i had no money except for ceta and that is actually what we should more look back to it's in our more recent history than perhaps a maybe slightly romanticized picture of what was possible um uh you know during the um wpa funding so for me that kind of a that kind of a question um leads to something that i wanted to ask you both about which is um if there are any i guess i'm not exactly sure how to ask this but maybe i'll explain it through what i've been experiencing which is that um are there any sort of blind spots in your own research that that you're now looking back now it feels 2021 that you're saying i want to do things a little differently and and for me one of the examples is something like the ceta funding where i was researching the 70s i saw that this was happening i was more interested in the local level i didn't go quite deep into it and now i'm realizing that i was so caught up in thinking about institutions i often forgot about the survival of individual artists and i have had so many reminders in the years since that work that i ignored a pretty fundamental piece which was like working conditions of artists how they're going to work i was so caught up in looking at institutional dynamics and that for me now um having gotten through this period and seeing how many artists have left the city and all of just the very particular needs to sustain an arts ecosystem how often i lost sight of the individual in my own research and that's something that i'm thinking a lot about these days and i'm just wondering um if for both of you you have any thoughts about how this time period has maybe changed whether it's practices or methods or things you want to look at or maybe it's changed aspects of the way you look at at subjects that you have studied i'm just curious about that if the answer might be no yeah i'm not sure so karen cut cut me off if you have something in particular because it does i'm i'm struggling with you i'm right there with you i was hoping you'd save me um well i'll say i'll bumble for a while uh permit and you can come up something um one of the things that i'd seen it though was that it was temporary it was one year employment so that that's that's a was an interesting example i think you're right to bring it up it was incredibly important and like and one of the other things that's distinctive about that um is federal level funding you know uh again like you know recognizing these very different sort of funding streams and you know that we kind of expect the city to and the city does have a lot of money for the arts compared to any other city in the united states you know um as well as the new york state council on the arts um as well so you know those are important funding streams but to recognize that the federal government can do things that other levels of government can't do and employment like that is one of them or providing money for the sida though it should have been more than one year temporary i think it's such a good point about not losing sight of individual artists um you know i struggled with that a lot in terms of wanting to have a kind of macro understanding of policy of institutions of context and um so one of the other things that i think about is figuring out you know representative artists or whatever but also artworks artworks that it is that it's about artists and you know in some of the ways that i was talking about i think that you know artists as residents is sort of an important thing to understand is that they have impact on our lives artists impact our lives when we live next to them in our buildings um when they live on our street and then have a musical concert outside in front of you right they don't just put on work in institutions whether it be a cafe or a um or Lincoln Center so in that sense artists as residents i think is a really important distinction that is pretty powerful in new york city that is a distinctive part of the of new york city and the other thing that i try to think about and that i feel like i'm not yet at is that artworks themselves are important to understand in and of themselves as sort of not only representative of the moment but that they have a life of their own as well one that often goes on and on when they get reproduced in various things when something that starts at the new york and that like you know miguel pinero that eventually gets to off-broadway that eventually gets to um it didn't start at the new york and i don't believe short eyes short eyes went from the public yeah went from the the public to Lincoln Center to Lincoln Center and then it was a movie with robber oh no no wait Lincoln Center and then it went to annenberg center in philly it's so it's so funny that you say that i just finished an entry for this book on 50 queer theater artists and i was writing on pinero and i'm like wait and i'm remembering that specific page so yeah it was the public then it was Lincoln Center then was then it was annenberg center at u-pen and then it became the movie that was directed by Robert yaw such a good example i think that you know not only what lives in our cultural lives and in our artistic lives is an artwork that you know travels many goes through people you know has different kind different people that are inhabiting that artwork um that it's i think it's kind of useful to think sometimes to make sure that we're thinking in those terms as well alongside artists institutions policy it's a lot to do but i think just a reminder that that that all of that is sort of makes up a cultural landscape thank you julia that was wonderful i don't have anything to add so so complete well that's great no i mean it's actually um absolutely appropriate with you know one of the things circulating was um what are some of the works that are touchstones when i think of this moment um of the 1970s and of course i wrote all about tkts and rarely stopped and looked at the shows on the stage sometimes i did um but you know when you step back um there was um there were two plays that were sort of anti- vietnam war protests and it's in 72 on broadway there was a barrigan kateinsville nine played there was uh david rave play so i had been completely focused on all of these things and had lost a whole other context of the work on stage when i was writing about tkts and it's to your point what were the actual shows that they were going to see not just the show that might have come up in a quote but what were the actual shows that were happening so thank you for raising that um i see that we aren't nearly at our time um we are basically at our time so um mostly i just wanted to um end off and thank everybody for coming i wanted to make sure though um if there were just any last thoughts that people wanted to get out about um the topics one of the things that i just wanted to sort of um highlight by bringing up the idea of the condition of artists is um i was at an event where somebody mentioned that there was a big reopening event that was created by the state government uh it's just about let's say i think it was a couple of months ago and they had expected the artist to work for free because it was an exciting reopening new york event and it actually took the head of the musicians union i'm not saying what the event was but it was a skirball event so you could see it on youtube if you want um but it's not skirball center but it was um a story told by the head of the musicians union at the skirball center that it basically took his intervention to say um if you're going to have a reopening event when artists haven't been paid in over a year you need to actually pay the artists even though we're all excited that new york is opening so for me that's the reason why i keep remembering to sort of re-center the artists because even when we are moving forward we're not always of course thinking about um that livelihood because we're thinking of so many other things um so that's why i brought it up um just a final note to give people um a couple of words to end on before we close um people have come up through the um through both of your discussions um you know whether it's ellen stewart or joseph papp i wonder if just as kind of a final note um is there a figure whose legacy we might sort of end end the session with and the session thinking about and that could be a particular aspect of algarine's work it could be something about holman i'm not sure but um just in the spirit of thinking about this sort of individual push of the artists that we are investigating is there anyone who comes to mine from our discussion today i would be um very curious to hear what we would sort of end off on for that well i'll just mention and it gets to the point of an artwork i'm trying to think through um a dance piece by twilight tharp called deuce coop and um it was performed first in 1973 it's and reimagined fairly shortly thereafter but it was you know to the music of the beach boys it was the first time that she and it was on stage uh originally performed in chicago but then in city center and um she has live graffiti artists behind her uh behind the dancers and um i really that fascinates me that juxtaposition that you know there's there's a live visual art going on behind the um dancers there's the she did away with that after in about 1975 not having live graffiti artists anymore um but that is a kind of juxtaposition that i think is really powerful to the moment um as well as to sort of the thriving of the arts in the city together to sort of recognize that you could have a big old modern dance piece by an avant-garde choreographer as she was understood at the time um with graffiti writers um creating some sort of event for predominantly white audiences um what the heck is going on there um so something like that sort of encapsulates the moment a bit for me i think for me um it's you mentioned algarine and before his passing um i went to visit him he was living in a facility uh nursing home on east 100 and death and just this conversation and he's asked me oh what are you writing what are you working on and was like you know what i was thinking i think we should start we need to start a writing workshop like let's do a poetry workshop with people here and like other folk and for me it's this enduring legacy that artists are always artists wherever they are right like he's from a particular moment where it's about the art where it's about the word where it's about creating right he wasn't thinking like how much money can i make you know through this writing workshop it was like oh we need art in this moment and it doesn't matter if you're living in a nursing home but everybody has a story to tell right and artists have stories that they're trying to tell how do they tell them and how are they able to tell them in a space you know in this in new york city where the cost of living is making it almost prohibitive for them to do that without thinking about the bottom line this is not to say that i don't think that artists should get paid i'm also an artist and it's always like well but you know why don't why can't you do everybody has you're getting money from an event you should always pay the artist right like this is work there's labor involved in that but this is for me that moment was it doesn't matter how old he got how sick he was it was about creating art right and opening up opportunities for other people to also have their voices heard even if it was for like five people sitting inside of the cafeteria of a nursing home it was let's let's let's utilize art to share right so that for me is is thinking about like a legacy of new york city and a performance starting in the 70s yeah that's beautiful um and thank you for that the person that i was thinking about actually goes right along with that which is douglas turner ward who very recently passed away the head of the uh negro ensemble company um in 1973 when he had a um a hit show that was being able to transfer to broadway called the river niger um refused to participate in tkts when it was in its earliest years um in part because he said my audiences don't want the cheap seats so don't try to put them off on my audiences um they deserve the best seats and i think it's such a great um example of an artist who is saying this innovative project just might not work for the art i'm trying to make and the audiences i'm making it for and similarly um to the point that you just made karen um he also knew that it wouldn't help his company be more sustainable it wasn't it wouldn't financially allow them to make more work and and keep making the work that they really cared about um and that was the person who i who just came to mind as you were telling that um that beautiful story so thank you for that and thanks to both of you for sharing um your knowledge your research with us today this was fantastic um i learned a lot and i just appreciate your time um and thanks especially to everyone um at the seagull center who made this possible um to tanvi and to jackie and to andy and to frank um it's just great to be able to have this conversation um in this setting and with all of you um and we hope you enjoyed it and we hope you'll be back for the final prelude events as well