Artists and Organizations: Are we collaborators or competitors?
Christy Bolingbroke, Executive/Artistic Director at the National Center for Choreography - Akron (NCCAkron)
Fellow performing arts presenters, organizations, and funders: does anyone else feel like a faceless banking institution when being approached by some artists? I know it comes from a well-intentioned place. Still, I cannot help but notice how even the most exciting ideas are undermined by the pervasive scarcity mindset across the nonprofit sector, limiting the potential success and squeezing the life out of a working relationship. I know that so much more is possible.
“[We] grew our practices around working responsively with artists rather than just carrying the burden of financial responsibilities.”
2016 McKnight Choreographer Fellow Megan Mayer in a work-in-progress showing in July 2019. Photo by Dale Dong/NCCAkron.
Operating from abundance and aggregating resources are two curatorial values that my current organization has held since its beginning in 2016, but I did not truly come to understand the potential of these values until we started working with the McKnight Fellowship Program. As one of two national choreography centers in the country, the National Center for Choreography-Akron (NCCAkron) exists to provide research and development opportunities in dance, and serve as an anchor in the national arts landscape. Partnering with the McKnight Fellowships for Choreographers taught me so much, and grew our practices around working responsively with artists rather than just carrying the burden of financial responsibilities.
McKnight Fellowships for Choreographers provides annual fellowship awards of $25,000 for study, reflection, experimentation, exploration, and/or creation to mid-career artists in Minnesota. The Fellowship Program is housed at the Cowles Center and funded by the McKnight Foundation. For over a decade, in addition to the unrestricted cash award, Choreography Fellowships have included the opportunity to work with a selection of host organizations and manifest a residency opportunity. NCCAkron was named one of five such host organizations for choreographers in 2019. Financially, the Fellowship Program offers $7,500 towards the activity and asks the host to match those funds, yielding a $15,000 budget to collaborate.
Artists have been conditioned to operate in a scarcity, product-oriented mindset. They are skilled at surviving and making magic while constantly receiving less than what they actually need, and dancemakers’ initial questions usually start around, what can you give me? While this is practical, I believe that it thwarts creative partnership.
Nonprofit institutions and arts organizations are also susceptible to systems and long-held conditions that create scarcity thinking. With the power they hold, many continue to perpetuate the problem as well. When I discussed the McKnight Choreography Fellowship residency activities with colleagues across the field, some immediately question why NCCAkron is not also being paid by the foundation to host these artists, defaulting to a, ‘what’s in it for me and my org?’ position.
The truth is the creative and collaborative aggregation of resources leads to a transformational experience for all. Both artist and organization are changed. Each entity has been able to do something wholly different that they could not have done without the other. NCCAkron has successfully secured general operating funds but could not exist without artists making dances. Whereas at least 80% of choreographers are working on a project-to-project basis without access to general operating funds, according to the New England Foundation for the Arts’ Moving Dance Forward report in 2016. In coming together from a place of symbiotic possibilities, the collaboration is rooted in a spirit of discovery, inherently challenging and chipping away at the scarcity mindset.
2019 McKnight Choreographer Fellow Ashwini Ramaswamy in conversation with Bolingbroke in March 2022. Photo by Dale Dong/NCCAkron.
So how does this actually happen? In our initial conversation with the artist, we focus first on their interests, instead of beginning with needs. We ask the artist how this work relates to their last. We break down the work to inquire more deeply and specifically about what they would like to try, or where they would like to experiment inside their own process– recognizing we are only a stop somewhere along their artistic trajectory. In subsequent conversations, we engage in what I call the ‘choreography of numbers’ through a joint budget tool. Having already committed to working together, these exercises and conversations are a dynamic practice where we can get to know each other more, consider different ideas, and continue to dreamstorm together. By the time we finalize the shared budget and incorporate it into the letter of agreement, we have not only future activity, but history as a foundation of the working relationship.
In 2019, artist Megan Mayer completed their current dance piece over the course of a week with NCCAkron. They also hosted an invited group of writers, artists, and curators on the ground to witness the work-in-process; and participate in a conversation and ideation session about the operational challenges and opportunities they face. In 2020, NCCAkron quickly let go of the original in-person creative residency planned with Taja Will to imagine several other working interactions over two years including: virtual guest teaching with one of our university partners; creating choreographic prompts for a distance initiative; co-facilitating a virtual study group among university dance educators; and a three-part satellite residency journey returning to physical practice in mid-2021. This spring, NCCAkron hit the road to join Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy on tour with the Ragamala Dance Company to facilitate a series of focus groups asking domestic and international programming partners, “What constitutes American dance?”
“We are simply not a vessel, a space, or a source of funding; we are changed by the artists with whom we get to work. ”
It is a learning environment for all involved. Working with each artist or group has changed and informed NCCAkron’s work both operationally and programmatically with other artists – the joint budget and shared costs are just one factor. Rather than focusing on how to churn out a program year after year and limit ourselves to asking who will pay for what, we practice self-reflexive thinking and work adaptively. NCCAkron is not a fixed entity, and embracing the uncertainty associated with the creative process makes space for our own growth and evolution. By inviting artists to co-design the experience, we are practicing vulnerability and true collaboration. They know our challenges, we better understand theirs, we look for shared interests or questions, and we are on this learning journey together—challenging, changing, reaffirming, and feeding into the next thing. We are simply not a vessel, a space, or a source of funding; we are changed by the artists with whom we get to work.
This work is hard.
Aggregating resources does not mean things will be easier. The scarcity mindset, the spirit of individualism, and unhealthy competition long-perpetuated by systems of White supremacy is the real work we aim to undo through this approach. Reclaiming the idea of a “match” as a strategic imperative instead of a philanthropic obligation has allowed us to aggregate resources with other institutional and individual artist partnerships of all scales and budgets from $10K to $200K. Foundations and organizations should consider artists as allies and co-conspirators rather than as a means to deliver a program. Similarly, artists should look for partners that share their values and want to build or learn something as well. Just handing over a check is not the definition of collaboration.
As Adrienne Maree Brown has said, “Trust is a seed that grows with attention and space.” In addition to giving more space to cultivate something around the resources, you will need to give the idea the attention it needs. To do this work requires habitual questioning instead of just solving for answers. But inside of that feedback process, you can also identify other habits and things to let go of in order to ask: What can we manifest together?
As an eight-year-old organization, it is easier for NCCAkron to embrace the beginner mindset over a scarcity mindset; to stay present and curious rather than program within a zero-sum game. Hosting almost 200 artists a year, our goal is to embody and perpetuate this truly generative and collaborative thinking, to change our peers’ minds and ways of working, one partnership at a time - so we can all thrive instead of merely survive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As the Founding Executive/Artistic Director for the National Center for Choreography at The University of Akron (NCCAkron), Christy Bolingbroke is responsible for setting the curatorial vision and business model to foster research and development opportunities in dance. Previously, she served as the Deputy Director for Advancement at ODC in San Francisco, overseeing curation, performance programming, marketing, and development organization-wide. Prior to ODC, she was the Director of Marketing at the Mark Morris Dance Group in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a B.A. in Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles; and an M.A. in Performance Curation from Wesleyan University. She currently serves on the Akron Civic Commons Core Team and as the Series Editor for the NCCAkron Series in Dance as part of The University of Akron Press. Additional service to the field includes: SouthArts Momentum; Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Arts Innovation Management Initiative; the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Advisory Panel; the Ohio Arts Council ArtsNEXT panel; and the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation New Works.
