Is art "labor"?
Coming soon…
Though IVP has been outwardly quiet over the summer months, we've been doing the painstaking work of script re-writes since the workshop debuted in Manhattan in June. The process is repetitive: write, comment, suggest, erase, re-write; then do a read-thru, get feedback, and go back to the drawing (writing) board once again. Iterate three or four times and, hopefully, you have a finished script by your deadline.
This quiet work precedes the outward-facing process: the rehearsals, the tech, and, of course, all the videos and photos we need to take to tell everyone about the work we're doing. And once the flashiness of performance wraps, post-production ensues — which, for theatre, means grant reports, budget updates, payouts, and debriefs, and then feeling great about putting on another show while secretly panicking about when the next one will come.
The life of those in the performing arts might look very different today, but in its essence it's the same as it was for the traveling Miracle plays of medieval times. We may not have pageant wagons (maybe we should??), but we metaphorically hop from town to town, putting on one show until it has exhausted its audience. Never really putting down roots. Accepting the transience.
It has never been easy to be an artist. And perhaps there's a reason for that. In our new play, The Arena — the one I mentioned we've been developing this summer — we explore the value of the artist's labor. And, frankly, we interrogate whether that work, quiet or explicit, can be valued as labor within our current economy.
Pictured: Hallie Flanagan.
Hallie Flanagan, our main subject, was a passionate advocate for the arts and artists. She headed the Federal Theatre Project, a creation of FDR's Works Progress Administration. In its four years, the FTP employed around 12,700 people and established what would become this country's regional theatre movement.
But it was brief. After just four years, the project was terminated. It was, after all, an economic relief program. The government ultimately had to spend taxpayers' money on things deemed more valuable, like hospitals.
But who measures the value of a story? I reference quotes and scenes from my favorite films to process or illustrate something of emotional resonance in my own life. People like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell would argue that we base our identities — and frequently the actions of our lives — on the stories we tell ourselves.
Ash and I have put a lot of our questions and reckonings about the artist's life into this new play (she wrote it, I edited it). As we head to our multiple "day jobs" so we can afford to do the things that feed our souls, we don't miss the irony of working on Labor Day. But it's that contradiction that somehow sustains the fire needed to keep creating. To keep finding the funds. And to keep building opportunities for ourselves and others. The work continues.
Pictured: Kate & Ash collaborate.
