Rebecca Novick

Asked to write about new business models I find myself instead thinking of un-business models. How can we move the business from the center where in fact the art belongs? Not move the money, which is always necessary to some degree, but the business, the unholy preoccupation with systems and structures and buildings and the perpetual employment of administrators.

I have the honor to be involved in a project that is striving to do this, a big, messy, ambitious collaboration with spiritual aims and practical struggles, led by a playwright and shepherded by his family of collaborators. Soulographie: Our Genocides is an international project organized by playwright Erik Ehn to bring together the 17 plays he wrote in the last decade about various genocides. Teams in ten cities are producing one or more of the plays locally, in preparation for performances of the full cycle at La Mama in New York City in November 2012. 

Erik is a playwright who is known almost as much for his innovation in collaborative art-making as for his extraordinary writing. Tired of knocking on doors looking for a theater willing to take on the full cycle, he conceived the radical idea of a production process with himself at the center. These plays, he believed, needed to come to life in the context of a collective journey of discovery and to live somewhere other than the land of what he calls “shiny postcard plays.” “The process calls together family – relationships that have been building over the 15-year writing process,” says Erik.

Each project is proceeding entirely differently — some hosted by universities where someone from the team is on staff, some part of a regular season at a theater, and some finding creative mixtures of income from fundraising and partnerships. In San Francisco, I’m directing Dogsbody, a piece dealing with child soldiers in Africa and in an imaginary future Texas.

We’re developing the piece via a series of residencies at schools and at the Playwrights Foundation, our local playwright's service organization, who have also agreed to serve as fiscal sponsor for the local project. The piece will be presented in San Francisco as part of a symposium on art and atrocity that I’m organizing with a number of collaborating organizations. Meanwhile Erik and his producing team in New York have secured a venue and are working hard to raise enough money from various sources to meet the costs of a cycle that will include more than 100 artists.

It’s an amazing project to be a part and may be a great model to try and replicate. Certainly the “depend on the generosity of the universe” approach is working well so far with offers of donated space and services pouring in. But there have also been some real challenges, ones that point out major problems with our typical producing structures.

For one thing, raising money as a fiscally-sponsored project is tricky. Many funders require nonprofit status, or look dimly on a project with no established history. Even funders with close relationships with Erik’s work are having trouble figuring out where this project fits and some big doors (like the National Endowment for the Arts') are completely closed.

Additionally, it’s hard to raise money for a project that takes place in multiple locations, as often local funders are interested only in work that will benefit their home community. And yet the theater is crying out for work like this that has national significance.

Finally, this is a new model that demands that the artists involved have the willingness and the chops to be producers as well, fortunately a role most of us are well prepared for by our time in the trenches of small companies.

But it does mean an even greater investment of largely unpaid time, bringing us back to an essentially unsolved issue: how to find a way to support artists in either the new models or the old.