By Carol Cooper

“….[W]e believe the $50 million allocated for the arts in the stimulus package was a fiscally responsible decision. Every community the performing arts’ presenting industry represents across the country equates to jobs, jobs and more jobs.”
–Sandra Gibson, CEO and President of APAP

“I think the most important thing this organization can do for its members is to help key leaders in the legislative body become more knowledgable and articulate about the arts issues we’ve been discussing….
I really do believe there is an unleashing of co-creative potential afoot.”

–Mike Ross, Chairman of the Board, APAP/ Director of Krannert Ceter for the Perorming Arts at University of Illinois

Two weeks ago live music and theater fans sampled the offerings of two of New York’s most adventurous yearly arts festivals. But few of the general public who flocked to Webster Hall for GlobalFest or to the various indie theaters hosting 8 days of “Under the Radar” shows were aware of the simultaneous gathering of entertainment power brokers at the Hilton that has been making such events possible for over five decades. Despite this comparatively low public profile, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters is the foremost advocate for the entire presenting and touring field on Capitol Hill. APAP, in coalition partnerships with the Performing Arts Alliance (PAA) and other arts advocacy groups–as well as business and cultural affairs organizations across the country–makes sure the voices of America’s arts professionals are heard by state and federal policy-makers.

I wanted to attend this year’s Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference for insight into how govenment subsidies, private philanthropy, university sponsorship, and community art programs quietly sustain public arts programming throughout the U.S. Whether we are talking about the upcoming Jacob’s Pillow Dance Fest or CMJ or Austin’s South by Southwest; APAP’s synergistic infrastructure is the mother of them all.

As a pop-culture critic I often pay more attention to commercial entertainment that is framed or driven by Hollywood, television, and the recording industry, I and my readers can forget how much the non-profit and public education sectors inform and invigorate the commercial sector. In fact, when it comes to diversity and quality the latter is often more dependant upon the vitality of the former than we might expect. It’s also significant that APAP promotes live dance and theater as well as music. The APAP vision of human creativity is broad, but its emphasis on the need for audience and performer to gather in the same physical space to communicate says something profound about the value of the “meat body” in an ever more disembodied cybernetic age.

Although officially only five days long, the APAP-affiliated panels, symposia, and live shows ran from January 8th to January 16th. This peek behind the veil of non-profit arts programming was fascinating. It was something of a shock at a trade show to hear booking agents, managers, arts administrators, theater directors, and performers talk more about actual *art* than commerce. Yes, APAP does lobby for grant funding and to streamline tax laws which favor corporate donations to the performing arts. But since most of its core membership started out as musicians, dancers or theater people they still see things from a performers point of view. For them, the performing arts function as an Underground Railroad for the human spirit. APAP–whether networking at its governmental, institutional, or community levels–sees itslf laying those railroad tracks.

You might think that music dominated the event, with the international diversity of GlobalFest supplemented by a dedicated jazz track plus multiple bands prioritizing folk retentions from Ireland, Quebec, and Latin America. But stunning theatrical highlights like the Korean reinterpretation of *Medea* at La MaMa, an Irish gay-liberation musical at Joe’s Pub; and the interactive collision of drama, dance, and circus arts which comprises “STREB: Lab for Action Mechanics” proves that music is only one of the pillars on which APAP rests its reputation.

This time last year APAP members feared the simultaneous loss of governmental, corporate, and private financial support as a result of the banking crisis. Then President Obama signed H.R. 1105 into law, which included an $10.3 million dollar increase in national arts funding for 2009. Riding the momentum of this reprieve, APAP prexy Sandra Gibson and her 19-member staff continued to watch and advise and publicize how these grant monies were deployed as they prepared for the next annual round of funding advocacy. Meanwhile the recession continued. Regional arts coverage in print media shrank while competition from digital and home entertainment systems was grew. Venue-owners fought to keep operational costs and ticket prices low at the same time as the frequency and length of bankable tours decreased. Increasingly the intimate, exclusive experience promised by theaters and concerts halls was undermined by multiple flickering “smart phones” posting free realtime video and commentary to the internet! And “sustainability” at the facilities level meant finding ways to cut the cost (and carbon footprint) of lights, sound, sets, and paper programs. Hence the theme of this year’s APAP confab: “Risk. Opportunity. Now.” Bold and succinct, the phrase rang like a clarion call to arts professionals and programs that survived 2009 to arrive in New York seeking collective solutions to issues with potential to diminish or destroy their industry.

Mornings were spent in panels structured to teach or share strategies useful to both business people and creative artists. The nightly members-only hotel showcases allowed talent buyers and purveyors of talent to connect. Acts were aimed at every conceivable demographic. Offerings ranged from Rat-Pack style caberet acts to Indian Hoop dancers, to Chinese opera. Rigid distinctions between high and low culture simply didn’t apply. Dividing lines between entertainment and education were aggressively blurred. Cultural delegations from Quebec, Sweden, and Brazil came shopping for university tours or club bookings. Info booths and special events overflowed with undergraduate volunteers sniffing out future career opps. The tiny APAP staff is able to keep most of its 2000 members in communication all year long with webinars, weekend workshops, research partnerships, interactive databases, consulting services, grant administration and their trendzine “Inside Arts.” Clearly, what I witnessed at the Hilton was simply the most compressed physical manifestation of infrastructural guild activity that really never ends.

Pet APAP initiatives on the cusp of this new decade include streamlining visa approvals for foreign performers; strengthening touring and teaching programs for live jazz; greening the performance industry, and helping the white house to view its support of public school arts programs and community arts centers (together with all their interdependant service industries) as necessary components of a national job stimulus package. Each of these projects is already well-underway, with SxSW heading into it’s second carbon-neutral campaign, and www.BroadwayGreen.org already converting local theaters to sustainable light and sound systems.

APAP itself remains a 53 year old distributed network with lefty/intellectual roots in the Madison Wisconson-based Association of College and University Concert Managers. By 1957 America’s growing number of progressive, college-affiliated arts presenters prompted a group of them to leave the pre-existing National Association of Concert Managers to form a similar network which emphasized the educational role of the arts and “those issues unique to hosting professional performing arts on campus.” Directed by Wisconson Union Theater manager Fan Taylor from 1957 to 1971, and changing its name as it grew to embrace first community theaters then artists and managers, APAP steadily expands its size and mission to better serve the public and its membership. Fan, who risked booking innovative acts like Miriam Makeba and Martha Graham long before her peers, set the standard by which APAP still measures its members.

I ask how Sandra Gibson, only the fourth Executive Director in APAP’shistory, sees its role in the coming decade and she replies: “Presenters are kind of the invisible profession. Nobody goes to the Kennedy Center to see the National Symphony Orchestra and thinks: “We’re in the presenter’s house.”….But that’s changing a bit now. We discovered after the culture wars that civicly-engaged presenters had become the lead communications channel between artist and audience, becoming the ‘partners of choice’ in commissioning and residency work.”

After America’s pre-millenial culture wars, foundations began funding trusted presenters rather than individual artists. This made APAP even more determined to vindicate this trust by helping presenters maintain quality, diversity, and community engagement in the productions their yearly budgets subsidized. The first GlobalFest, with it’s unique international focus and “parallel stage” model, came together under APAP guidance.

“Presenters were the original bookers and distributors,” Gibson continued, “and now they’re involved in actually producing work. Projects come to them, then they find collaborators. And because we have as part of our membership artists, agents, and managers too, the issues around all of the performing arts come to the table. We facilitate and provide the forum for those deliberations. Presenting is a collaborative art. What’s so beautiful about what’s happening today is that it’s no longer a “booker” who [simply]bought the talent and an “agent” dropping off a contract with a rider. It’s a shared enterprise. “