Spotlight on Kristy Edmunds, Executive & Artistic Director, UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance

Tell us a little bit about UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance and your role there. 

UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance is a performing arts organization in Los Angeles that has an expansive history in commissioning, producing and presenting live performances and unique frameworks for the work of artists. We work with dance and contemporary choreographers, theatre makers, musicians and composers across contemporary music genres, authors, poets, and creative collaborations across art forms.  Our work is in direct dialogue with artists and creative producers throughout the world, the US and those based in our local community.

I am the Artistic Director and the Executive Director and I’ve been here for about ten years when it shifted from UCLA Live which it was called in the past to UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance. We are located in Royce Hall on the UCLA campus.

How has the Center adapted its programming to the online environment?

The adaptation has been huge, and it still is. I have to go back to the initial onset of COVID in order to illuminate how we made shifts because they’re quite substantial. Because I’m at UCLA where there is a massive medical research center, I had access to how this campus was preparing itself for multiple Covid-19 scenarios. I was like, if they’re moving at this speed of urgency this is not going to be a small blip and I recognized that the arts would be profoundly impacted. So I started conjuring the ideas for how we could shift.

I knew the impact to performers would be immediate and severe because of the way their economy is derived. Health and public safety requirements halted an extensive number of shows and tours, and therefore their livelihoods. We tried to never use the word cancel but instead, “postpone” – just for the more imbued optimism of it. We worked to reschedule their performance dates, and we also put deposits down on their fee, so that they had at least some resource to draw from. My biggest concern was if planned engagements stood still in contractual force majeure and were pushed out further and further into the future, these artists would have no income. So directing financial support wherever possible was a top priority and a value for how we approached our decision making.

For many artists, we shifted the fees for performance engagements into commissions. The hope being that they could stabilize a bit…and undertake a new work or approach, as they needed. Our scheduled international artists were ready to tour regardless, but with embassies shutting and with my anticipation that the Trump administration would shut down the issuing of all visas (which they did), there was a dawning recognition that to proceed put everyone at the mercy of multiple and changing governmental policies, no clarity, and multi-week quarantine periods. We shifted those touring projects into support for filmed performances in their place of origin. We filmed them in the various theaters or community centers that they could gain access to, while here at CAP UCLA we started our work on creating a digital channel where all of the projects were reconceived for on-line access. We didn’t just put our archives up; we kept making in direct dialogue with artists, managers and producers.

Another effort was to go non-digital. In dance we commissioned 26 U.S. based choreographers to create hand-made dance scores however written or drawn, that illuminates their approach for planning an idea. These were a bit like creating a metaphoric love letter to the future of dance, when all of their touring or rehearsing simply stopped. We are turning these scores into fine art print editions, and each choreographer will soon have a number of prints they can sell to economize themselves through a different medium and strategy. I set another variation on the idea into motion with 100 highly diverse composers worldwide (Notes on Napkins). With the resources we had remaining, the priority was to keep some kind of liquidity and working relationship active, in a manageable way for the artists as everyone’s livelihoods became further imperiled.

I like how your focus has been on keeping the artist employed and sustained financially from the get-go which has been the most devastating for them.

There’s something about being in a cultural leadership role and working with people around the world in which for me and for many of us, it’s not just about booking a gig, it’s about fulfilling a promise and generating cultural exchange, recognizing our mutual interdependence, and sharing what we can with one another. When you have a government or a set of agencies that block you from fulfilling your promise, it makes things seem impossible. I think a lot of these artists were stunned when CAP UCLA said, Okay so what’s our work around? What’s our plan? Let’s find a way around this rock because there’s got be another strategy -- as opposed to saying, let’s keep rescheduling dates out into the instability of an uncertain future.

Prior to the election, the performing arts sector was devastated financially, and international touring and collaborations may be forever impacted. In what ways will the results of the U.S. election influence the future of the performing arts sector?

First and foremost, this election recharges the cultural sector because we are no longer trying to hold forth under the constant degradation of our democracy and principles. The burden that was created by the unreliable, profoundly cruel positions of the previous administration and its threat to our democracy, well, the election was like yanking the emergency break before we went over a cliff. Our democracy as an evolving pursuit can be resumed, however shockingly thin the election margin was and how much reckoning work there is ahead. In the arts professions, we can start to get back to the work we do that is value-based, that is fair-minded, and that carries a level of compassion through cultural exchange that our global collaborators can again be able to trust without being thwarted by some insanity from the White House.

Economically however, it’s going to take us a long time. The Covid-19 impacts are one thing. Not only the performing arts sector, but all art and cultural sectors have been hard hit. Because so much of our economy in performing arts is driven through ticket revenue – months or years of no ticket revenue that slows to a trickling that is akin to a ‘tip jar’, means that you have tip jar money to build up from. I believe the Biden/Harris administration will have to decide on their commitment to cultural policy due to the scale of what has happened.

So yes, our arts infrastructure in this country has been severely damaged and if one thinks of ways to repair it – I can see some use in the notion of aligning us with the things the new administration is talking about in terms of investment into green technologies and other infrastructure frameworks – which have also been neglected for decades. The arts and cultural infrastructure (people and places) have long been left to the winds of either a marketplace competition or a constant adjustment within philanthropic efforts. I do think there is a role for the arts to play within the new administration that looks at social cohesion and the diversity of equitable belonging, as an infrastructural framework proposition nationally. Our global standing has also been damaged, and the arts can play an important role there as well. We know that artists and cultural heritage spaces the world over have been deeply impacted even if they have a different funding model. Meaning that this will be a worldwide cultural restoration effort requiring cooperation and acknowledgement around our interdependence, if we are to strengthen our trade-routes and the pipelines needed for another generation of artists to ensure the mobility of ideas and cultural expression can sustain and thrive.

In terms of international touring and collaborations, how do you foresee those changing given the results of the election? 

The election results are restorative and promising, but my speculative insight has more to do with the continuously expanding timeline of the pandemic. What is encouraging is that many of us as colleagues have been on zoom meetings together and actively sharing ideas, plans and strategies. There’s also a network of highly diverse curators, artistic directors, and producers in this field who have worked together for decades, and we all of a sudden spent a great deal of time ‘open-sourcing’ our approaches in service to the whole ecosystem. You don’t pull together in a crisis to share ideas and then jump back to being competitors over closed resources. With my colleagues - festival directors and performing arts curators as well as independent artist spaces and cultural centers, we have invented a way to support continuity through digital stages which is a major change. In some places like the UK, they have a well-practiced apparatus for live streaming and monetizing it, but for many of us, we’ve had to rapidly learn an entirely new grammar and are applying new tools as fast as we can, which are also exciting and full of potential. These will remain important even when audiences are able to return to live performances because after all, we do have climate change as an urgent fact that is having its own surge.

Many of us in the arts are talking about how our modes of distribution can calm in place a bit while still sustaining our work economically. How we can reduce our footprint on the land and our consumption of natural resources, is an active consideration. The more we are able to build an acceptable aesthetic with the tech industry for what artists and organizations are putting out there, the more mobility and exchange we can preserve or even enhance. I’m working with a number of international festivals and organizations to explore commissioning projects together that can be exhibited/presented live in one location while streamed and shared on-line in another and vice versa, as one of many such ideas.

One thing that the pandemic brought up was the fragility of the sector. How might we strengthen the sector in the coming years and increase its sustainability so that it can thrive rather than decline in the future?

This is likely an alternative vantage point for responding to your question, but I passionately believe that it’s important to look at how strong our sector is – the strength of our artists, the strength of what we offer within societies, the strength of our cultural continuity with one another, the strength of our willingness to engage in our humanity beyond the dollar, the strength of how we inspire and motivate and create a sense of interdependence – these are strong, powerful, monumentally valued ways of being that are durable and profoundly important. Our fragility as it were, arises when we are mistakenly relegated to a perception of being separate from useful investment, rather than an integral part of economic cohesion. What we generate accrues financial benefit adjacently to other businesses and industries - it accrues to an airline when we buy a ticket, it accrues to restaurants when our audience is nearby, it accrues to material and retail providers, and the list goes on and on. We generate value to society that is both economically accruing and culturally accruing. To me, our sector is extremely powerful. What keeps it vulnerable is the willing restraint of entities with resources to minimally invest within what we provide, which reduces our capacity for spurring this outwardly accruing benefit – when we need it to be reliably ongoing.

The perception that we are forever in a state of dysfunction and need, or that we are destined to be under-economized as an enduring national fact is worth upending.