Carrie Ahern, a Wisconsin native, is an independent dance and performance artist who has been based in New York City since 1995.  She worked primarily as a freelance performer/choreographer for over a dozen dance and theater companies until forming Carrie Ahern Dance in 2005.  She describes her company as “committed to organic and original collaborations with dancers, composers, musicians and visual artists” and elaborates in this interview with Fractured Atlas…

Tell us more about the work of Carrie Ahern Dance.

I create a hyper-specific world that is complete in its lush layering of visual, kinesthetic and aural textures.  The work is architectural in the rhythm created through repetition, precise timing, and the tension within negative space.  Deceptively simple movement distill questions about the complex nature of being human.  The audience is called upon to participate viscerally and emotionally in the world.  This allows the work to cast its potent spell.

What forces have most heavily influenced your work?

Recently my philosophy studies, most specifically that of the ancient Greek pre-Socratics and Friedrich Nietzsche have been very influential.  The pre-Socratics’ ideas predate so much of what we take for granted as far as scientific theory or what is “known” about our natural world.  They were interested in everything and the connections between everything.  One of the questions that my most recent piece, The Unity of Skin, asks is, “Where does the intersection of the texture of our environment and the matrix of our own bodies begin or end?”

The pre-Socratics stem from primarily an oral tradition and struggled to articulate philosophical ideas as the Greek language was becoming rich enough for them to do so.  I have a lot of questions about oral vs. written traditions, and what is lost when we choose to name something or write it down and therefore codify it.  For myself, spending a lifetime in dance — a form that is ephemeral and live and not viewed by the world as pragmatic — feels absolutely necessary in a world with such a prejudice towards written, historical traditions.

I also find myself drawn to extreme physical types: ultra marathoners, explorers, and durational performance artists such as Marina Abromovich or Phillipe Petit.  Not simply for their seemingly impossible achievements, but for what happens to the body and the mind in the process of those achievements.

I strive to keep up a personal, physical practice through yoga, ballet, improvisation, etc. that allows me to ask questions through the experience of my own body.

What have been your most recent successes?

Continuing to push myself to follow my internal compass.  Pushing myself to be braver and investigate deeper.  To keep going back to the studio and to be inspired and scared and continue to keep going back.

I am also happy that my last two evening-length works made it to performance at two of the most magical spaces around — Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church and Baltimore Theatre Project — and that there was a live, responsive audience to be a part of each.  I found the support (with help from many) to pay my collaborators, fulfill my vision, and share it with the outside world.  This is no small feat.  And dance continues to feed me and others.

You’ve been a Fractured Atlas member for nearly five years.  How do you use your membership?

Fractured Atlas is my fiscal sponsor, allowing me to receive grants and tax-deductible contributions that are normally available only to 501(c)(3) organizations. I also have health insurance through Fractured Atlas. I use my membership to get discounts on things such as car rentals.  As one of their Fiscal Sponsorship Projects, I have a profile on the website, which people can view.  I ask the staff’s advice on many topics, such as planning a benefit. I also look to their blog to keep me updated on political news as it relates to the arts, and for ideas about new ways to make my art happen.

What’s next on the horizon for Carrie Ahern Dance?

The Nietzsche Circle, an organization interested in bringing Nietzsche’s work into living culture, has invited me to create a dance interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to premiere in Fall 2009.  The research phase of this has been going on for almost two years, and this fall I stepped into the studio with dancers to develop the work.  I conceive of the end project to be a durational performance with audience moving between two performance spaces and free to move as they choose or stay as long as they like.  It is extremely ambitious.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra — what is there to say?… This is hard to explain, but all I can tell you is reading Nietzsche, I felt he was right in the studio with me.

Kenneth King, the only other choreographer I know of who has attempted an interpretation, says in his essay “The Dancing Philosopher”, “Zarathustra is more than treatise or polemic, but an exuberantly prophetic, provocatively high-octane philosophical work written in the form of a fractured allegory whose sublime literary virtuosity is frosted with biting satire and a rarified poetic distillate… Dance is continually referenced as one of its exalted mimetic triggers and serves as more than mere trope or metaphor. Zarathustra announces a new paradigm specter — Isadora Duncan rightly called Nietzsche the first dancing philosopher… Did Nietzsche actually dance, or was Zarathustra’s secret art a convenient metaphor for the Dionysian equation?”

How can we learn more about your company and your work?

A great way to learn more about my work is to hear me interviewed by veteran dance writer Eva Yaa Asantewaa.

A benefit performance party for Carrie Ahern Dance and The Zarathustra Project will be held on Thursday, February 19th, 2009, 7-9pm.  More information, and the opportunity to purchase tickets, will be coming soon to my website: www.carrieahern.com

Images 1-3: “The Unity of Skin” (2008), photos by Michael Faulkner.
1) David Figeuroa (left) Kelly Hayes;
2) Jillian Hollis;
3) Jillian Hollis (left), Kelly Hayes.
Images 4-5: “RED” (2006), photos by Steven Schreiber. Dancers: Carolyn Hall, Jennifer A. Cooper, Carrie Ahern, Yoko Sugimoto, Donna Bouthillier, Eun Jung Gonzalez, Julie Betts and Christina Briggs.

A Philadelphia-area visual artist and member of Fractured Atlas since December 2003, Ellen Priest has taken jazz as the subject of her paintings since 1990.  She creates a series of mixed-media paintings based on a single jazz composition. Her recent work has used jazz pianist/composer Edward Simon’s “Venezuelan Suite” as its inspiration.

Ellen, tell us more about your technique.

My paintings are constructed from superimposed layers of paper — the back layer opaque watercolor paper, the front layers translucent vellum — each with drawing, color and more recently, collage.  The result is that one sees a painting through a painting.

Who or what are your strongest influences?

I would point to three very diverse sources:  First, my steadiest visual art influences have been Cezanne’s later watercolors; Matisse’s color and compositional structure; and Abstract Expressionism, especially the work of Willem De Kooning and, later, Joan Mitchell.

Jazz and related African and Latin American music have changed my work.  Specifically, the rhythms and harmonic structures have both affected color and composition.  My website offers more thoughts about the interface between jazz and my paintings.

And, finally, I’ve been fairly athletic all my life.  My favorite sports are the “balance sports,” where motion depends on weight and balance thrown off-center, often in response to terrain: skiing, swimming, cycling, rollerblading, water-skiing and skating.   

It’s not often that a visual artist claims athleticism as an influence… Tell us how your enjoyment of sports has influenced your paintings.

I love being a physical person in a physical world, and movement is critical to understanding my artworks. It’s particularly apparent in my brush studies.  I strive to get an anthropomorphic feeling into the marks I make, even though they are abstract.  Art gives form to feeling.  Movement is the carrier of meaning. A career-changing book I read over 30 years ago, philosopher Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form, developed both those concepts. You could say that I work with visual movement.

How do you define “success”?

To me, there are two kinds of success: public and private.  The public or “career” success includes the critical recognition, the sales of my paintings, the grants and exhibitions.  This success keeps me fed and in the studio, and will preserve my work when I’m gone.

The second is my personal assessment of my artwork — the images themselves, the clarity and creativity of my thinking, the intensity and rigor of my long-term process.  Have I created artwork that satisfies my largest goals?  This is the success that allows me to look myself in the eye after nearly 30 years in the studio and feel happy.  This is also the one that keeps shifting, and moving farther out ahead of me as the work continues to grow.

These two kinds of success clearly merge at times — for example, when I see people experiencing the joy and energy I hope they will in the presence of my work.

What has been your greatest success to date?

In 2007, my first museum show was held at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania.  While the exhibition was up, I received my second Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.  Both were deeply gratifying.

How did you hear about Fractured Atlas and what motivated you to join?

I was researching health insurance on the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) website, which led me to Fractured Atlas.  I was intrigued by Fractured Atlas’s mission and joined [in 2003], figuring that as it grew, even more services would be available to me…which has been true.

Finish this sentence: “Art is important because ______.”

…it gives symbolic form to experience, both for the artist and for the viewers.

How can we see and learn more about your work?

Please visit www.ellenpriest.com.  Lots more paintings, and lots more about the interface between jazz and my images.  There’s also a short animation designed to help viewers understand the surface and physical depth of the paintings.

Images:
Top and middle: Jazz: Edward Simon’s ‘Venezuelan Suite’ #10 and #3, © 2006. Oil and flashe on collaged paper, each 42″ x 42″.
Bottom: Jazz: Gonzaguinha’s Africa/Brazil #9, © 2004. Oil and flashe on collaged paper. 42″ x 42″.

New York-based Small Pond Entertainment is an emerging theatre arts organization that was started five years ago by artistic director Michael Roderick when he found that it was virtually impossible for an artist to be at their best when they also had to produce.  In this interview with Fractured Atlas, Michael elaborates on his organization’s mission, tells us what’s ahead, and explains what goes into making a “Hot Cripple”…

Michael, tell us more about Small Pond Entertainment’s mission and work.

Small Pond Entertainment seeks to help artists who are developing work by providing producing services, enabling the artist to focus on their art.  We assist the artist by general managing the production, helping to find donors, and helping them budget.  We do this while teaching the artist all about producing so that they can go on and do it themselves someday.

What has been your greatest success to date?

I would have to say this summer’s sold-out productions: “Sleeper” at Manhattan Theatre Source, “The Director’s Reality” at the Midtown International Theatre Festival, and “Hot Cripple”.

Tell us more about “Hot Cripple”:  How did it come about?

“Hot Cripple” came from a chance meeting with the writer/actress Hogan Gorman at an after party for another show we produced, “Liberty and Joe DiMaggio”.  Hogan told me that she had a story and she’d eventually be looking for a producer.  She emailed me when it got accepted into FringeNYC, but her invite ended up getting buried under a mountain of other emails.  Luckily, a mutual friend forwarded me her need for a producer the day before the paperwork was due and she came running down to the school where I work and signed me on.

It seems that with “Hot Cripple” you really accomplished your mission of providing production assistance so that artists can better focus on their art: at the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival, the one-woman show garnered actor/playwright Hogan Gorman the festival’s Overall Excellence Award for “Outstanding Actor”.

What did you expect (or want) your audience to experience during the performance and to take away after they leave?

My hope for the piece was that the story would get the audience talking about the current U.S. healthcare system and open up a dialogue about how poorly people are treated when they don’t have health insurance.  I like finding really good stories that get people to talk.

You’ve been a member of Fractured Atlas since 2004. How did you find out about our organization?  What motivated you to become a member?

A friend of mine was running a theatre company called Prophecy Productions, which was a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas.  He explained to me how fiscal sponsorship worked and I went on the website to check it out.  When I saw how informative the site was and how much support the organization provided, I decided to sign up then and there.

Finish this sentence: “The artist’s role in society is to…”

“…to lead people to ask questions. To challenge the norm and refute the dominant ideology. The artist is there to turn on the lights when it’s hard to see the art.”

Who or what are your biggest influences?

Our biggest influences come from the theatre community, the public, Playwrights Horizons, Ken Davenport, as well as many other companies and producers.

What’s next on Small Pond Entertainment’s horizon?

We are currently running a monthly comedy series that splits all proceeds with indie theatre companies; I am currently writing a blog for people interested in producing on the ground level; and we have a show coming up in January 2009 called “Dead Pan”, which is also quite thought-provoking.  And we continue to help as many artists as we can with networking events and development opportunities.

How can we read/experience/learn more about you and your organization’s work?

You can always check out my blog, http://oneproducerinthecity.typepad.com/, or take a look at the Small Pond website: www.smallpondentertainment.com.

Images:
Top: Michael Roderick, Artistic Director, Small Pond Entertainment. Photo by Erica Singleton.
Middle: Promo image for “Hot Cripple”. Hogan Gorman, Playwright, Actor.
Bottom: Images from “Proof by Disproof” (July 2006). Pictured: Craig Anthony Grant, Christopher Beier (top) and Nell Casey.

Name: Cara Winter
Website: www.carawinter.net
Hometown: New York, NY
Artistic Disciplines: writing, acting
Fractured Atlas Member Since: February 2002
Fractured Atlas Services Used: Fiscal Sponsorship, Health Insurance, Liability Insurance

Cara, tell us about your work in a few sentences.

For about a decade, my focus was on performing, and I worked and toured all over the country.  But I’ve always written, on the side.  I am often inspired by the work I’m doing as an actress; for instance, I wrote two children’s plays while teaching acting to children, and wrote a play about an alcoholic while on tour with… well, you get the picture.  Last summer, my first play, “Social Work”, was picked up and produced by the Manhattan Repertory Theatre; and I have three more adult plays, all in-progress: “Poker Face”, “Seeds”, and “Alan Alda sat next to me on a park bench”.

Who/what are your biggest influences?

David Auburn, Aaron Sorkin, and Amy Sherman-Palladino are my major writing influences.

What has been your greatest success to date?

As a performer, it would have to be playing to a packed Fox Theatre in St. Louis.  Incredible.   As a writer, it was when “Social Work” was produced at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre.  The actors were amazing, the director and co-producer were incomparable.  Then the “aftermath” of the play’s success was SO cool:  several requests came in from development types to read the play (one at the Public, one at the Flea, as well as a film producer).  It was an incredible experience, and I learned so much.

How do you use your Fractured Atlas membership?

Fractured Atlas has helped me to obtain liability insurance (when I produced a short film), fund-raise and promote my production/s, and network with other artists.  For a while, though, the most important aspect of my association with Fractured Atlas was access to health care.  Last August we welcomed our first child into the world (a son, Avery), so having good health coverage was a priority.  My husband is also a freelancer, so he doesn’t have coverage through an employer.  Without FA, I’m not sure what we’d have done!  Glad I didn’t have to think about that.

Finish this sentence: A world without art is…

lonely.

How can we see/hear/read/experience/learn more about your work?

Whenever I’m in production with a piece, I usually send my blurb to Fractured Atlas’s community calendar.  I also have recent news on my own website: www.carawinter.net

Images:
Top: “Social Work” by Cara Winter at Manhattan Repertory Theatre;
Catherine Gowl as “Margaret” and Stas May as “Geoff”.  Photo by N. Warren Winter.

Bottom: Cara Winter as The Ghost of Christmas Past, with Cork Ramer as Scrooge; National Tour of “A Christmas Carol”.

Fractured Atlas member Juli Borst, an opera singer, was featured in a segment called Money Makeover on this morning’s Today Show.   In the segment, a financial adviser helps Juli get her financial house in order, which includes signing up for health insurance.  When they’re explaining all the steps they took, Fractured Atlas gets a nice little mention.  Check it out: Singer Gets Money Makeover. Thanks for the nod, Juli!

A number of our members have reported receiving disturbing emails, phone calls, or letters from Infinity Administrators over the past few days. Infinity Administrators is the company that provides the HealthFlex 2000, HealthFlex 365, and Dental Discount Plus plans which Fractured Atlas offered for several years. If you have received one of these communications, PLEASE talk to us before jumping to any conclusions.

Please be advised that there has been a severe misunderstanding between Infinity Administrators and Fractured Atlas, and it appears that things have gotten a bit messy. I’m very sorry that so many of you were dragged into this. We are working to correct the situation and you can expect further details soon.

In the meantime, I want to clear up a few facts:

1) You have never had to be a member of Fractured Atlas to enroll in any of these plans. Infinity offers all of them on an individual basis, just as any insurance company offers individual versions of their plans. HOWEVER,

2) The rates you’ve received as part of our group have always been significantly less than you’d receive on your own. For example, here are the rates that Infinity currently charges.

Note that HealthFlex + (which is identical to HealthFlex 2000) is $209/month for individuals. By comparison, Fractured Atlas members could enroll for $169/month.

HealthFlex DDS (which is identical to Dental Discount Plus) is $31.25/quarter as an individual. By comparison, enrolling through Fractured Atlas cost $28.00/quarter.

If Infinity has approached you with the same or lower rates as the ones you were paying through Fractured Atlas, that is a special offer they’re making and does not reflect anything that is publicly available.

3) Although we no longer offer these plans to our membership, we were proud to do so for 6 years. Our decision to remove the plans from our website and stop accepting new enrollments should not be interpreted as a criticism of Infinity or the plans themselves. It was simply time for us to move the healthcare program in a new direction, which we’re continuing to do.

Please contact us at support@fracturedatlas.org or (212) 277-8020 with questions.

Business Week reports on the growing problem of sub-standard health insurance being offered by universities to their students:

More than half of the insurance plans recommended by colleges offer benefits of $30,000 or less, according to a survey published in March by the General Accounting Office, an arm of Congress. Many plans have further limits that prevent payout of even modest maximums. While two-thirds of the country’s more than 17 million college students have coverage from a parent’s employer or their own job, many of the rest may be vulnerable if they suffer a serious illness or accident. With premiums and restrictions increasing under employer-provided plans, a growing number of parents are shifting children to college-sponsored coverage. But “when a student gets gravely sick, $30,000 in benefits is unrealistically low,” says Alan Sager, a professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health.

Schools often arrange for a standard student plan, and some even bill for it automatically unless students or their families opt out. But the administrators negotiating multimillion-dollar insurance packages frequently aren’t sophisticated or diligent enough to obtain the best deals in the marketplace, says Mark Rukavina, executive director of the Access Project, a nonprofit health advocacy group in Boston. “Unfortunately, most schools don’t know how to secure the best coverage for students, and so what results is simply the illusion of coverage.” Students and parents, for their part, often don’t take the time to study the fine print.

The really unfortunate aspect of this is that students and their families are looking to the schools to provide unbiased expert advice. Many appear to be substituting faith in the university’s judgment for doing their own due diligence. Yet the universities are doing a lousy job of earning this trust.

The good news is that students are very well-positioned to get coverage elsewhere, often for less money and with better benefits. Non-profit associations like Fractured Atlas can serve as effective advocates and are more aggressive about negotiating favorable benefits packages. And as the article points out, even the individual market often offers better deals than what the universities are providing.

For the past two years, Fractured Atlas has been experimenting with a program called the Arts Wellness Network here in New York City. The concept was that we could assemble a network of artist-friendly health care providers, with a focus on preventive care and alternative medicine, who would make their services available to the arts community at discounted rates regardless of insurance coverage.

As a pilot effort in NYC, the Arts Wellness Network was well received, but we could never figure out how to make it scale, since the overhead involved in assembling and maintaining a provider network is huge. This Spring, thanks to a partnership with HealthAllies (a division of UnitedHealthcare), we’ve finally cracked the code.

Starting today, the Arts Wellness Network is now available to Fractured Atlas members nationwide. For $15.50/month, the program offers pre-negotiated reduced rates within a network of 500,000+ providers. Also included is NurseLine, a 24-hr hotline that provides access to a registered nurse any time of the day or night.

Find out more about the Arts Wellness Network or sign up today.

My apologies for another wonky health insurance post hot on the heels of the last one, but when there’s a major newspaper op ed on a subject I’ve been ranting about for years I can’t resist…

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Congressman Ed Royce (R., Calif) makes the case for federal regulation of the insurance industry:

Because of a Supreme Court decision nearly 140 years ago, the states have sole regulatory authority of insurance. What has resulted since is a bureaucratic cluster of 51 different regulators (every state, plus the District of Columbia) overseeing their individual jurisdictions, punishing American consumers and insurance providers alike.

At Fractured Atlas we’re living this nightmare every day. Mainly it affects our health care program. Despite our community of over 52,000 arts professionals nationwide, we’re forced to fragment our group into 51 sub-groups. This seriously undermines our negotiating leverage with insurance companies. We also have to wrestle with 51 different health insurance regulatory agencies, which I promise is neither easy nor fun.

The most common justification for state-based insurance regulation is that the state insurance departments are the best providers of consumer protections. In truth, some states get it very right, others get it very wrong, and most are somewhere in between. There’s no reason to believe, however, that federal regulators can’t enact their own adequate consumer protections. And a simplified and streamlined regulatory environment would facilitate much greater competition than currently exists in the market for private insurance, which can only benefit consumers.

Today’s Wall St. Journal features a provocative op-ed by Jonathan Kellerman called The Health Insurance Mafia. Kellerman argues that a major source of dysfunction in our health care system is the fact that we’re overly reliant on health insurance as a payment mechanism and that health insurance companies extract far more money from the system than they provide in added value.

You don’t need to be an economist to understand that any middleman interposed between seller and buyer raises the price of a given service or product….The health insurance model is closest to the parasitic relationship imposed by the Mafia and the like. Insurance companies provide nothing other than an ambiguous, shifty notion of “protection.” But even the Mafia doesn’t stick its nose into the process; once the monthly skim is set, Don Whoever stays out of the picture, but for occasional “cost of doing business” increases. When insurance companies insinuate themselves into the system, their first step is figuring out how to increase the skim by harming the people they are allegedly protecting through reduced service.

Insurance is all about betting against negative consequences and the insurance business model is unique in that profits depend upon goods and services not being provided….

Health insurers… affix themselves to the host – in this case dual hosts, both doctor and patient – [and] systematically suck the lifeblood out of the supply chain with obstructive strategies. For that reason, the consequences of any insurance-based health-care model, be it privately run, or a government entitlement, are painfully easily to predict. There will be progressively draconian rationing using denial of authorization and steadily rising co-payments on the patient end; massive paperwork and other bureaucratic hurdles, and steadily diminishing fee-recovery on the doctor end.

Kellerman is overstating the case, but his basic reasoning has some basis in reality. I’ve long argued that overinsurance is as big of a problem as underinsurance in our system.

The (admittedly imperfect) analogy is to car insurance. No one expects her car insurance to cover a routine oil change. Miraculously, people nonetheless manage to make sane decisions about when to get an oil change and how much to pay. Unfortunately, we’ve been conditioned by a paternalistic health care system to avoid anything that might incur out-of-pocket expenses, so people without health insurance actually do forgo necessary care. But if we can ever retrain ourselves to take greater responsibility for our own health care, then there’s a lot of potential in the principles of “consumer driven health care”.

Interestingly, Kellerman’s piece inadvertently hints at one of the strongest arguments for a single payer health care system. All of these insurance company shenanigans amount to attempts to manage their risk pools. Since they all pull the same crap (e.g. denying claims, erecting barriers for unhealthy populations, etc.) it’s all a wash in the end. This is essentially a Nash Equilibrium. If all the insurers decided together that they’d cease all these practices, their risk pools would be essentially unchanged, but their overhead costs would drop by 20% or more. This can’t ever happen in reality, though, because as soon as one of the insurance companies steps up to plate, it’ll get hammered by the remaining bad actors. The only reliable way to wipe the slate clean and eliminate risk juggling is to ensure that there is only one risk pool containing the whole population. This is arguably the greatest benefit single payer has to offer.