Spotlight on Jacqueline Davis, Independent Arts Consultant

What does sustainability mean for post-pandemic international cultural engagement?

Although the time of Covid has not ended, it is subsiding to the point where we in the United States can dream about our future endeavors. I, for one, have been thinking a lot about how the world of the performing arts has been altered because of our global isolation from one another and how the arts will sustain themselves going forward. Will audience members return to sitting side by side among hundreds of people confident they are safe from contracting a virus? Who will come back to perform on our theater stages and who will continue to dance and sing and act in outdoor makeshift venues in parking lots, suburban driveways, and closed off streets? How much time—and money—will audiences keep spending on virtual concerts, plays, and dances? And finally, what is going to happen to touring performances that require artists and staff to travel around the country and abroad?

Even as artists, producers and presenters, and funders turn their attention to getting performances back on stages and audiences back in seats, it would be a missed opportunity to “just” get back to where we were in 2019. Especially when it comes to the global flow of artists and cultural performances, the arts presenters’ community should be coming up with new ways to make international cultural engagement truly more sustainable than it was before the pandemic.

Among the many important “sustainability” questions on the table for arts presenters: What should the future of international presenting look like? How can we mitigate the environmental impact of international touring, especially related to airplane travel? How will organizations, of all sizes, bounce back from the financial losses of the past year and a half and can we develop new, long-term funding pipelines for international engagement? How can we deepen and maintain the connections between artists and the communities they visit, stay in, and perform in?

Artists feed our souls. Their work provides an essential ingredient to our lives that help us relate to one another. This is especially important as we live in a world where we continue to lack understanding of one another's cultures. Part of a global ecosystem, the arts provide a safe place where we can see the "other" and attempt to understand one another's beliefs and values with respect. This essential ingredient requires the ability to experience international artists in the US and for our own artists to bring their work to audiences around the globe.

The arts community has been travelling the world for years—one night in Paris, followed by two days in Frankfurt, then five days in Cairo. While recognizing the importance of these international tours, artists and cultural professionals must acknowledge the responsibility we have to the planet. All travel negatively impacts our climate, including international arts touring. Additionally, as governments and the philanthropic sector focus on jumpstarting the domestic cultural sector, funding for hopping continents week by week may not be available to many arts organizations for some time.

A group of leaders in the arts have formed a coalition to grapple with these challenges of financial and environmental sustainability of international cultural engagement. Convened by David Dower, former Artistic Director of ArtsEmerson, and MarkRussell, Artistic Director of Under the Radar at the Public Theatre in New York, with assistance from HowlRound, this group is motivated by the worry that unless international presenting is reinvigorated now, precious connections among the community could be forever lost. Calling themselves the International Presenting Commons (IPC) to emphasize the commitment to resisting individualism and giving a voice to everyone involved in the process, they started with around twenty arts leaders and have grown as other presenters have joined the effort. In addition, international presenting networks have been added to the group with the goal of increasing the chances for buy-in for their recommendations from a broad range of presenters and artists.

IPC agreed to expand the notion of what constitutes a presentation to be more flexibly responsive to what artists can make at this point. In addition, they have emphasized their commitment to work in a non-hierarchical playing field. This seems like the ideal value to begin with. IPC’s value statement asks that arts professionals genuinely collaborate with their colleagues. For example, contract agreements would not include exclusivity clauses that, in the past, have kept artists from performing in a specified region for a period of six months. In addition, the group has discussed exploring residencies that are not place-based. A group performing in one city as part of a residency could spend a week or more travelling the region instead of staying in one place. They are also committed to reducing their environmental impact by diminishing the number of scouting trips.

If these recommendations are adopted by the international arts presenting community, it would be a first step in the community’s commitment to mitigating climate change. Some of the natural hesitation to adopt these recommendations will come from those who have traditionally seen their responsibility exclusively to their own organizations and not to the presenting community’s obligations more broadly, including to care for the planet. Or they may worry that it will affect their own roles and reputations within their own organizations. This attitude does not recognize the power of the arts community to effect change especially in the areas of cultural understanding and care of the planet. Olga Garay-English, one of the founding members of the International Presenting Commons, commented that not everyone will change but the more you can model behavior, others are more likely to accept these values.

I find myself thinking more and more about what constitutes a realistic win-win situation: sustainable arts organizations, a healthy planet, and the constant flow of artists reaching audiences across the globe. In the past, artists traveled to a town for one to two nights and then got back on a plane to repeat this process. If we are to commit to reducing our impact on climate change, “touring residencies” that last at least a week or two will cut down on travel and its environmental impact. Hotel rooms, food, and general caretaking are costly. In my experience, audiences love getting to know the artists. Especially in smaller communities, many residents are honored to provide meals for visitors. And some artists are amenable to staying in locals’ homes. With Airbnb, a room in a home can cost less than a hotel, while also providing a deeper tie to the community than a hotel in a business district would. Presenters need to reach out to both the local community and the touring artists to find those willing to try these new offerings to show they can be both efficient and enriching and won’t diminish the professionalism of the field. Without a doubt, the value of having artists active in a community, meeting other local artists and enthusiastic audiences is a win-win situation. By more deeply embedding themselves in a community, these artists can have an enhanced experience, impacting their own art after they return home. Even as these ideas address the financial and environmental sustainability of residencies and touring, they also point to a more sustainable connection between artist and community. 

To make international cultural engagement truly sustainable, it is incumbent on both the federal government and the philanthropic sector to make this particular field a priority in arts funding. Vital to sustaining many arts groups through the pandemic were the grants and loans provided by the federal government though emergency relief legislation and by the support of private foundations who especially stepped up to directly fund artists and the operating budgets of cultural organizations. Yet rising vaccination rates are already leading to significant increases in the cost of travel, from car rentals to airline tickets. And even in the decade before the pandemic, the philanthropic sector had already been cutting back on its support of international cultural exchanges. 

One of the first agenda items set by the International Presenting Commons was to recognize the need for a U.S. cultural arts policy that would include international engagement. Both the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of State support international touring by American artists and cultural groups and bringing foreign artists and performances to the United States. We saw how over the past four years arts culture dropped even further from the government’s priorities when the previous Administration disbanded the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and proposed executive budgets zeroing out NEA funding. President Biden has a chance to not just reinvigorate support for the arts. But particularly as he focuses on rebuilding America’s alliances and its image abroad, he can harness the power of the arts to help achieve those goals. Increased funding and an improved visa policy would increase international offerings for Americans across the country and help bring the best of our artists to people around the globe. Groups like the International Presenting Commons, working with the professional arts associations, can help make the case to the Administration and Congress of the importance of a sustainable international arts policy.

If presenters know they have access to a bigger pool of funding—and that that money will be accessible and steady over multiple years—they can make commitments to this international programming over the long term. And the groups and artists who produce and take part in this activity can thrive. 

One thing is for certain. Everyone is anxious to experience new things. Artists want to create. They want to perform for audiences whom they can see and hear responding to their work. The Covid era has taught us that the planet was happier when we were not creating carbon problems. I salute the leaders who have been working valiantly to address these various challenges while placing the value of international engagement of artists at the forefront of their work. And I enthusiastically await the success of their work.

Jacqueline Z. Davis, a member of the NYU Brademas Center Advisory Council, is former Executive Director of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and former Executive Director of the Lied Center of Kansas.