APAP BREAK/ROOM Conversations is a unique series of virtual dialogues with leaders across our field---artists, presenters, producers, agents, managers, funders and other arts workers---launched in response to the current crisis. Industry influencers engage in discussions to provide insight and thinking on stabilization, recovery and transformation.
Now six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the performing arts field has weathered enormous upheaval and loss---from an avalanche of cancellations and rescheduling, to the loss of revenue, income, jobs, health and safety.
Yet crisis often brings innovation and clarity. Together with colleagues across the field, we are forging new paths in programming, partnerships, technologies and communities. Additionally, artists, producers, agents, funders and presenters are calling our field out (and inviting us in) to address all that wasn’t working, wasn’t equitable, and wasn’t sustainable long before the pandemic struck and that was made all the more evident since the pandemic began.
In response, performing arts professionals are mobilizing to advocate for new ways to operate and do business that will advance equity and sustainability. Using a social justice lens, they are developing new strategies, resources, guidelines, models and support that will drive transformation in the field.
Whether it’s field working groups re-imagining partnerships between presenters, artists, and agents to advocate for new standards and contractual language, or efforts to re-imagine and leverage one’s resources and influence to benefit the greater good, innovations are happening across the country that will transform our field. In this two-part series of conversations we explore the following:
- How are we re-imagining partnership -- between institutions and artists/agents/managers/producers, between presenters and community, and between the arts and other sectors, as we advance equity and social justice in our field?
- What are methods and steps toward institutional and individual accountability to create a just arts ecosystem and for our communities?
- What are examples of program innovation born out of COVID-19 – be they new commissioning initiatives, re-imagination of space and use of technology or the elevation of the artists and presenters in society that promise long term solutions for pressing social needs and the recovery/sustainability of our ecosystem?
Interested in helping to sponsor APAP BREAK/ROOM Conversations? Please contact Niiyo Narnor-Madison at 202.207.3845 or
nnmadison@staging.apap365.org.
