The New York Innovative Theater Foundation is currently conducting a demographic survey of theater artists producing in the off-off Broadway (OOB) community. Since they need about 6000 responses, I wanted to pass this along and encourage people to participate! The survey should only take about 4 minutes to complete and you can find it here.

They ALSO just published a statistical analysis of OOB production budgets which presents some fascinating information (for example: the largest % of productions had budgets of below $5000!). I would recommend it as a must-read for anyone in or out of NYC who is considering self-producing in the OOB community (which is often where many independent artists & emerging companies start out). Survey results can be found here.

I would be interested to hear how their findings compare to markets outside New York. Any members outside NYC care to comment on that?

Dutifully passing this along from our friends at The Public Theater:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Candi Adams/ Sam Neuman 212-539-8642 press@publictheater.org

THE PUBLIC THEATER NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR 2009 EMERGING WRITERS GROUP

GUIDELINES AVAILABLE ONLINE FOR SECOND YEAR OF THIS GROUNDBREAKING INITIATIVE

TIME WARNER CONTINUES AS FOUNDING SPONSOR

June 10, 2008 – Expanding on its history of developing new plays and cultivating new voices for the American theater, The Public Theater (Artistic Director Oskar Eustis, Executive Director Mara Manus) is now accepting applications for the second year of The Emerging Writers Group, an initiative that seeks to target playwrights at the earliest stages in their careers and nurture their artistic growth by providing necessary resources and support. In doing so, The Public hopes to create an artistic home for a diverse and exceptionally talented group of up-and-coming playwrights. This program is a component of The Public Writers Initiative, a long-term program that provides key support and resources for writers at every stage of their careers. Time Warner is the Founding Sponsor of The Public Writers Initiative.

The Public Writers Initiative fosters a web of supportive artistic relationships across generations of writers that will influence the future of contemporary American theater. Many of today’s most honored and recognized playwrights such as John Guare, Suzan-Lori Parks, David Rabe, Christopher Durang, Wallace Shawn, Ntozake Shange, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner and Nilo Cruz have a long history developing their work at The Public. The Public has also produced some of today’s most important plays and musicals, such as Hair, Sticks and Bones, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, The Colored Museum, Topdog/Underdog, Caroline, Or Change, and A Chorus Line. The Public Writers Initiative ensures that The Public’s great tradition of supporting playwrights and playwriting will remain central to its future.

“The Emerging Writers Group represents one more way The Public Theater can throw open its doors to extraordinarily talented individuals and provide them with an artistic home,” said Artistic Director Oskar Eustis. “We were thrilled to receive over 700 applications last year and we ultimately selected a diverse group of writers, many of whom did not begin their playwriting careers through traditional channels. We look forward to welcoming twelve new playwrights to the Emerging Writers Group in 2009.”

“Nurturing new voices is a cornerstone of Time Warner’s arts philanthropy,” said Luis B. Castro, Executive Director of Philanthropic Initiatives at Time Warner. “Through the Emerging Writers Group, The Public has created an artistic home for a dozen gifted storytellers. We are excited to be moving into a second year of this initiative, helping bring career and development opportunities to more talented undiscovered and early-career writers.”

Through an open application process, The Public Theater will select 12 promising playwrights to join the Emerging Writers Group for one year.

Selected playwrights will receive a $3000 stipend. Works by Emerging Writers Group members will be presented in at least one reading at The Public. They will also participate in a biweekly writers group led by The Public’s Literary Department and master classes with established playwrights. Additionally, they will have a chance to observe rehearsals for productions at The Public, receive career development advice from mid-career and established writers, and receive artistic and professional support from the Literary Department and Public artistic staff. Members of the group will also receive complimentary tickets to Public Theater shows, invited dress rehearsals, and other special events, as well as a supplemental stipend for tickets to productions at other theaters.

Visit www.publictheater.org for application form and guidelines.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: AUGUST 29, 2008.

Materials must be postmarked by August 29th or received at The Public Theater by midnight on the 29th. Finalists will be contacted in early December to set up in-person interviews to be held at The Public Theater. All applicants will be notified of their status by mid-late December 2008. The program will begin in January 2009 and continue through the end of December 2009.

REQUIREMENTS FOR ELIGIBILITY:

Cannot have professional representation for playwriting including, but not limited to, agent, manager or lawyer.
Cannot be a full-time student during the duration of the program.
Cannot be enrolled in any academic playwriting course during the duration of the program.
Must not have had any productions in New York other than those using the showcase code or in an off-off-Broadway theater with 99 or fewer seats. (If your New York show used a higher contract tier than the showcase code, you are not eligible to apply. If your New York show received a festival production in a theater with more than 99 seats and did not use an Equity contract, you are eligible to apply.)
Must live within the tri-state area
Must be able to attend evening meetings at The Public Theater every other week in 2009 as well as other events throughout the year, such as master classes, retreats, observerships, and other special events at The Public.
Must be available for an in-person interview in early December 2008.
The Public Theater will select the strongest candidates based on the overall strength of the applicant’s play submission, artistic statement and interview. The Public will look for candidates from diverse backgrounds who show tremendous artistic promise and talent, as well as responsible and dedicated individuals who are serious about a career in the theater. The Public is especially interested in playwrights who have not begun their writing careers via the traditional channels. The selection committee will be comprised of Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Mandy Hackett, Associate Artistic Director; Liz Frankel, Literary Associate and other full-time artistic staff.

Applicants with questions are encouraged to refer to the Frequently Asked Questions posted on The Public’s website; questions not answered there may be emailed to EWGquestions@publictheater.org.

The Public Writers Initiative will fall under the auspices of the LuEsther Lab, named for the late LuEsther T. Mertz, who was a major benefactor of The Public and Chair of its Board from 1973 to 1987. The LuEsther Lab provides creative and financial support for artists at all stages in their careers through commissions, residencies, readings and workshops that have proven fundamental to The Public’s artistic success.

# # # #

THE PUBLIC THEATER (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Mara Manus, Executive Director) was founded by Joseph Papp in 1954 as the Shakespeare Workshop and is now one of the nation’s preeminent cultural institutions, producing new plays, musicals, productions of Shakespeare, and other classics at its headquarters on Lafayette Street and at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The Public’s mandate to create a theater for all New Yorkers continues to this day on stage and through its extensive outreach and education programs. Each year, over 250,000 people attend Public Theater-related productions and events at six downtown stages, including Joe’s Pub, and Shakespeare in the Park. The Public has won 40 Tony Awards, 145 Obies, 39 Drama Desk Awards and 4 Pulitzer Prizes.

# # # #

The LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust provides leadership support for The Public’s year-round activities.

Time Warner is the Founding Sponsor of The Public Writers Initiative, a program within the LuEsther Lab for New Play Development.

Major support for the LuEsther Lab comes from The Ford Foundation, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Family Foundation. We are also deeply grateful to The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for its leadership commitment to The Public Theater’s Endowment Fund in support of new work.

Major support for The Public Theater is provided by Bank of America, The New York State Music Fund, The Shubert Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation of New York, The George T. Delacorte Fund at the New York Community Trust—Fund for Performances at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, and Warren Spector and Margaret Whitton. Pepsi is the official beverage sponsor and Bertani Wines is the official wine sponsor of The Public Theater.

Additional generous support is provided by Debra and Leon Black, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Susan Stein Shiva Foundation and The Starr Foundation. Public support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Continental Airlines is the official airline of The Public Theater.

I just want to send a public congratulatory note to Back House Productions, a longtime Fractured Atlas organizational member, on the incredible success of In the Heights, the new Broadway show that won the coveted Best Musical award (also Best Score, Best Choreography, and Best Orchestrations) at the Tony Awards on Sunday. The show’s director, Thomas Kail (who was Tony-nominated for his direction), the artistic director of Back House Productions (BHP), is a former member of Fractured Atlas. BHP originally developed In the Heights a few years back and continues to produce great work. I had the pleasure of seeing the show recently in its Broadway incarnation and it’s a terrific, unique, energetic, and completely enjoyable musical.

Benjamin Salka, a producer at BHP, is a current member of Fractured Atlas and has used our Liability Insurance program to obtain insurance for some of BHP’s productions.

Fractured Atlas congratulates Back House Productions and all of the cast, crew, and creative team of In the Heights! We’re glad that we can say we’ve played at least a [very] small role in both BHP’s and In the Heights‘ success.

Just about a month after the Flickr announcement, we’ve got some more bling for your online member profile!

If you’ve got a blog somewhere, the odds are pretty good that you’re publishing a feed (either RSS or Atom). Well, you can now enter your feed url into your profile settings and it will automatically pull and display snippets of your recent posts. Here’s what mine looks like.

This site gets a lot of traffic, and it’s pretty well targeted for your audience, so hopefully this is a nice way to drum up some interest and get a little exposure.

Let me know if you have any questions or have trouble getting it to work.

“If every artist in America’s work force banded together, their ranks would be double the size of the United States Army,” reports Sam Roberts in today’s NY Times. This conclusion is drawn from a groundbreaking new report from the National Endowment for the Arts titled Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005.

I realize not everyone will be as interested in this as I am. Not only do I run an organization whose customers are exclusively artists, but I’m a shameless statistics junkie. Still, what’s significant about this study (at first glance anyway; I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet) is that is provides some of the basic data on our industry that has historically been entirely elusive.

Here’s how the NEA describes the study:

Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005 is the first nationwide look at artists’ demographic and employment patterns in the 21st century. Artists in the Workforce analyzes working artist trends, gathering new statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau to provide a comprehensive overview of this workforce segment and its maturation over the past 30 years, along with detailed information on specific artist occupations.

The use of census data is probably the only practical way this research could have been conducted, but it does raise some important questions about the report’s comprehensiveness:

First, census data is biased towards a strictly economic definition of employment. The study does include people who identified an arts field as their second job, but it includes only 300,000 of such individuals, compared to 2,000,000 who claimed an arts field as their primary employment. While I don’t have any hard data to refute this, bushels of anecdotal evidence suggest there are at least as many, if not more, “semi-professional” artists as there are folks who make their living exclusively or primarily through their art. I even spoke with someone at the US Department of Labor who believed that their arts-related employment figures were 40-60% below the true numbers. So the fact that the NEA report counts just 300,000 artists whose income comes mainly from other sources strikes me as being seriously under-representative of this broad segment of the industry.

Second, census data is biased towards white, mainstream artists whose work falls into a European tradition. One of the things I’ve learned in our local advocacy work is that a white, middle-class college graduate is much more likely to self-identify as an artist than an equally talented, dedicated practitioner of a non-European folk tradition. Likewise, a graduate of Yale’s drama school who pays his rent by waiting tables thinks of himself as an actor, while a Latino janitor who happens to be a brilliant amateur photographer would never in a million years call himself an artist (this latter example is from a real person I met in Brooklyn). This is another factor that suggests the NEA data is almost certainly under-reporting certain large segments of the industry.

These are real concerns, but they shouldn’t seriously diminish the significance of the NEA report. Frankly, despite the fact that the report’s numbers are probably much lower than reality, I suspect many will be shocked at the sheer size of the U.S. arts sector. Artists are often seen (and see themselves) as operating within a strange niche at society’s margins. It’s hard to retain this stereotype when you learn that our ranks exceed those of lawyers, doctors, police officers, or farm workers, and roughly equal those of the active and reserve armed forces.

Think about that the next time someone implies that you’re not an authentic American or that you don’t contribute anything meaningful to society. Oh yeah, and don’t forget to vote.

The Fractured Atlas website got a face lift today. This is mostly cosmetic - a new graphic design, revamped navigation, and a few tidbits of new content. The functionality should all be unchanged.

Love it? Hate it? Love it but hate the puke green dropdowns? Let us know what you think!

We’re once again spanning the globe! O.K., we’re just spanning the country. But, still, come say hello if you’re at any of these events!

Tuesday 6/10-Saturday 6/14
National Performing Arts Convention
Place: Denver Performing Arts Center/Colorado Convention Center — Denver, CO
In Attendance: Adam Natale, Arwen Lowbridge, & Bob Middleton (Board Member)

Fractured Atlas has a booth next to the cafe… Come meet us there or visit one of the breakout sessions we’ll be serving on. Arwen is facilitating “New Models for Incubation & Fiscal Sponsorship” and I am a panelist for “The Art of Living or Living for Art: A Survival Guide for Artists.” Both sessions take place on Thursday 6/12 from 2:45-4:00PM and again from 4:30-5:45PM.

Thursday 6/19-Sunday 6/22
Americans for the Arts 2008 Annual Convention
Place: Sheraton Philadelphia City Center - Philadelphia, PA
In Attendance: Adam Natale & Dianne Debicella

If you consider yourself an emerging arts leader, join me at one of the Emerging Leader Network dine arounds on Friday 6/20 (Nodding Head Brewpub) or Saturday 6/21 (El Vez).

Thursday 6/26-Friday 6/27
The Cutting Edge: Best Professional Practices for Visual Artists
Host: Tremaine Foundation
Place: Chicago, IL
In Attendance: Alexandra Gray

Hope to see some of you at these events! Please introduce yourself if you’re in attendance.