What Does Dance Heritage and Preservation Have To Do With Cultural Policy?[note 1] Marian A. Godfrey, Director, Civic Life Initiatives, The Pew Charitable Trusts.	1/2

Andrea Snyder, Founding Director of the National Initiative to Preserve America’s Dance (NIPAD) and Executive Director, Dance/USA, and Greg Ruffer, [former] Program Manager, NIPAD, asked me to speak about the relationship between the burgeoning interest in cultural policy development and cultural heritage and preservation—specifically, dance heritage and preservation. I also want to talk about where NIPAD fits into that relationship, and how the successes of NIPAD can be extended into the future.

First, I’d like to define some terms, starting with “culture” and “policy.” In previous panels, we had a lot of discussion about defining dance, documentation, and preservation. The need to refine and sharpen definitions is a characteristic of a young and developing field, as is dance documentation—and as is cultural policy in the United States. In both these arenas, much progress has been made over the past decade.

Culture and policy are both words which, in the United States, conform to Lewis Carroll’s notion of meaning, as spoken by his surrogate, Humpty Dumpty, in Through the Looking Glass. As Humpty said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” And when Alice responded, “The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things,” Humpty flattened her with, “The question is, which is to be master—that’s all.”

Now I always read this statement as a rhetorical flourish and a complete non sequitur but I have to admit that, given the incredible anxiety which the phrase “cultural policy” seems to provoke in almost everyone in the arts community, Carroll is as usual on to something germane. Many of my colleagues have taken issue with The Pew Charitable Trusts and other foundations’ recent focus on cultural policy research and analysis, because “cultural policy” suggests to them that someone else—someone who is probably not benign—is likely to master the decisions that affect their artistic well-being.[note 2]

In defining my terms, then, I hope to demonstrate that this neither should be nor exists as the actual situation.

Taking on “culture” first, I want to locate a middle ground between “arts,” to which those of us from the visual and performing arts gravitate, and culture, in the broad anthropological sense—that is, all social institutions in addition to the arts that make up the non-economic component of individual and community life, including family, school, religion, cuisine, and other expressions of social identity. Because these institutions carry a society’s values, they are often contested when there is a conflict of values between two societies or portions of a society. Hence the broad definitions of “culture wars” in the United States of the 1980s and 1990s, and “globalization” today to include conflicts over religious, educational, and family values.

From the perspective of the arts and humanities, such a definition of culture is hopelessly broad and paralyzing. Yet defining “the arts” only by the terms of the visual and performing arts is constricting. Such a definition obscures the full spectrum of intellectual and imaginative meaning-making that the arts share with the humanities, folk life, and heritage preservation. The working definition the Trusts are currently using, in both our direct grantmaking to Philadelphia cultural organizations and in our national policy related research and information efforts nationally, includes what we have come to refer to as four “domains” of culture: arts (including media arts), humanities, heritage preservation, and folk life. Recognizing that this definition is in some sense arbitrary—remember Lewis Carroll—we are finding it workable. Our research also shows that it coincides with the ways various cultural groups define themselves and their shared interests within their communities, and with how some researchers and cultural leaders have begun to define cultural activity.

As to “policy”: I generally think of policies as decisions that determine the allocation of resources, including time and effort as well as money. Chris Dwyer, in her study on state-level innovations in public cultural policies that have led to more financial resources for culture, defines the term policy as “the tools and strategies that guide a line of action, including those that direct the allocation of resources.”[note 3] Most definitions of policy link the concepts of conscious decisions or actions with the allocation of resources. Public policies are those that describe actions taken on behalf of the general public—that is, actions taken by government decision-makers. But, as I hope this definition demonstrates, the fundamental reality is that policies are developed and acted upon by all sorts of individuals and institutions, not just governments.

Certainly in the arts, decision-makers who determine financial resources include not only governments, which at the combined local-state-federal levels are responsible for less than nine percent of the aggregate nonprofit arts budget, but also philanthropies (nine percent); corporations (six or seven percent); individuals (nine percent, lower than in the nonprofit arena generally); and the general public, who, through admissions, memberships, purchases, and other activities provide earned revenues to organizations that account for about fifty-four percent of the pie. Another piece of the pie chart I’ve just sketched out consists of income from endowments, which accounts for about twelve percent.[note 4]

I would argue that no single source of funding is large enough to wield the kind of power over the arts that some cultural advocates fear. I would also argue that boards, artistic directors, and executive directors of arts organizations, who make decisions about allocating resources to operations and programs, and determine by those decisions the balance among all those types of earned and contributed revenues for their specific organizations, are as much policymakers as are public and private funders.