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Feature Elayne Gross, courtesy of the NEA Rocco Landesman tours a classroom at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies (CCS) with CCS’s president, Rick Rogers. By claiming that the arts are an economic engine, there might be those who would ask why they should be funded by the government as opposed to private businesses. I don’t think the private sector has a broad-based plan for economic development on its own. A wiser small business administration supports small businesses. Some might say the marketplace should support small business. The government believes that certain small businesses need assistance to get established, and once they do they become significant employers. I think that artists are, in fact, small businessmen. They’re entrepreneurs, and we know that if we bring art and artists into a town, it changes that town radically. It changes the entire ethos of the place, and it also becomes a different place with a different economy. We have a lot of data that proves that—where you can create artist clusters you really jumpstart economies in place after place. Artists are great place makers, and they are transformative in communities. We know this, and that’s the case we’re going to be making tirelessly. I was recently in Stratford, Canada, where the Stratford Shakespeare Festival is. It’s run by my good friend Des McAnuff. The Canadian Council For The Arts makes significant grants to Stratford, and it is one of the most thriving communities economically throughout all of Canada. It’s amazing to see what happens. They still do rep there, which is mostly unheard of in this country, and you really see how the presence of the arts can transform a place. It’s a textbook example. www.stage-directions.com/roccolandesman ONLINE BONUS For the complete interview with Rocco, including why Long Day’s Journey Into Night is his favorite play, visit www.stage-directions.com/ roccolandesman For you, what constitutes the success of an NEA funded project? I think are two criteria. One is artistic. If it’s theatre, and the play contributes to the field and is interesting artistically, is compelling in some way, reaches and effects an audience or stimulates thought and discussion and engages the com- Rocco Landesman with Dowoti Désir, a Haitian priest and scholar, who is installing an altar to accompany “African Continuum: Sacred Ceremonies and Rituals” at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora. munity, we think that’s a success. There’s an artistic metric in and of itself. The second aspect, of course, is how it relates to the community, to the whole place in which it functions. We’re looking to artistic organizations to jumpstart economies in a lot of communities and for a lot of this artistic activity to have an economic impact. So there’s a double criteria there. During recessions we usually have arts programs being cut in schools. It should be the last thing cut, and it’s always the first. How can the NEA effectively stress the importance of these programs to schools that are struggling to make decisions about what they should cut? Our point is that if this country’s going to be economically competitive around the world, we need innovation and creativity. We need to be training well-rounded kids who are going to be able to make this country compete in areas that are going to be important in the future. Our manufacturing base keeps declining. We’re probably not going to increase our manufacturing footprint in the world as we go forward. If you look at a lot of our exports in entertainment and technology—areas in which we have economic traction—creativity, innovation and imagination are integral parts of this, and arts education is vitally important to that. What should we know about the NEA and your plans for moving forward? I think we want to partner with other federal agencies and with the private sector to expand the arts footprint all across the country and really raise the level of the conversation about the arts, to bring the arts into the national conversation. It would be a great legacy for us. Do you think that the Great Recession is going to be the biggest hurdle you’re going to have to deal with in your time at the NEA? No doubt. It’s affecting all of the arts institutions. It’s affecting the NEA and its funding. It’s affecting everyone. And we have to deal with it. Photo by Ellen Shershow Pena, courtesy of NEA 26 August 2010 • www.stage-directions.com
The NEA’s Face of Theatre Lisa Miller Ralph Remington, director of Theatre and Musical Theatre for the NEA As Director of Theatre and Musical Theatre for the NEA, the recentlyappointed Ralph Remington comes from a rich arts background. He has been doing theatre since high school and was also a dancer for ten years, tackling jazz, tap, modern, African and acrobatics. He has also been a political activist since a young age and found a way to straddle the worlds of art and politics, as Stage Directions learned when speaking with him. Stage Directions: You’ve moved between the world of theatre and politics throughout your life. How did you go from theatre into politics, and how do you manage to balance the two? Ralph Remington: All of my theatre life has pretty much been involved in politics, and as an individual I’ve always been torn between politics and art, so I’ve found ways to combine both. A lot of my art making has been sociopolitical in nature. I was a political activist from early on. I was involved in homeless squatters rights in Philadelphia when I was 12 or 13 years old. I was the first president of my high student body at a performing arts high school in Phillie, so I lead walkouts and sit-ins and demonstrations on the Board of Education. That’s the kind of stuff I had been involved in for quite a long time, so for me theatre became an active form of social change. Ironically enough, what got me into musical theatre in the first place was musicals—just watching West Side Story, Oklahoma, Mary Poppins and all those musicals from back in the day. All of the stuff drew me into theatre. Originally I was an actor/singer/dancer going to high school, and prior to that I started studying dance at 14 years old, so from the time I was 14 until 23 I was jazz/tap/modern/African/acrobatics. That was my original calling. Ben Vereen was an idol of mine, along with Louis Gossett Jr., James Earl Jones, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. Those were the people who shaped my vision of being an artist—then Baryshnikov, of course. I would go see whatever he did. I worshiped at the altar of Baryshnikov. All of these things came to play, and eventually when I was at performing arts high school my sociopolitical self really emerged as the strongest thing. I looked at the careers of dancers and realized that a lot of them end up crippled or hobbled. I feel stuff now from things I used to do, not just in performance but in clubs. I used to do a lot of club dancing, too—just for fun on the street and on the floor and all that. I was on the cutting edge of the hip-hop movement because I was one of the original hip-hop generation people. Sugar Hill Gang, Rapper’s Delight, Grandmaster Flash, LL Cool J and all of those folks came about when I was a junior and senior in high school. I just heard that stuff at block parties. The generation before was informed by Vietnam and World War II, and now a hip-hop/rocker/Creole generation has come about, and the epitome of that is probably Barack Obama as the President. We’re the same age, so his influences were probably very similar to a lot of mine and a lot of people that you see in different fields. What are your plans as Director of Theatre and Musical Theatre at the NEA? The thing that everyone is asking is how do we survive as an art form, and not just survive but thrive. How do we get audiences that are excited? How do we speak to the American moment? How do we create bold, new, innovative ways of presenting theatre and musical theatre? How does that happen? Where are these artists? How can they get funded? In looking at old subscription models, we need to look at exploring membership models for theatre subscription. For instance, every month if Joe Blow or Suzy Q gets $10 or $25 deducted from their checking account—if they don’t miss that $25 and it goes to a theatre subscription—they don’t have to come up with $300 or $500 to subscribe to be a member of theatre. They’re subscribers by $20 or $25 coming out of their checking account every month. Perhaps they could be brought into a pool of theatres that share in that subscriber base, so people can be flexible not only in the shows or in the seats that they get to go to but also the theatres that they get to go to in a more fluid fashion than we look at theatre patronage today. www.stage-directions.com/ralphremington ONLINE BONUS For the complete interview with Ralph Remington, head over to www.stage-directions.com/ ralphremington www.stage-directions.com • August 2010 27
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Page 14 and 15: Green Room A.C.T. Appoints Ellen Ri
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Page 43 and 44: The Play's the Thing By Stephen Pei
Page 45 and 46: www.stage-directions.com • August

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