What Does Dance Heritage and Preservation Have To Do With Cultural Policy?, cont.	2/2

Which brings us to dance documentation and preservation.

Given that the financial pressure on nonprofit cultural organizations is even greater, if that’s possible, than when NIPAD began in 1993, incorporating a commitment to documentation and preservation into core programs and operations of dance organizations is a policy choice that is more difficult than ever to make. I want to stress that this is a policy choice that, if it is to have sustained impact, needs to be made systematically within both the dance and funding fields. It needs to be part of an interactive and mutually reinforcing process, because we—the funders—can’t do it alone any more than those of you in the dance field can.

Clearer thinking about the most urgent priorities for documentation and preservation, both on the organizational and field-wide levels, is more important than ever, because resources are scarcer and societal needs for those resources are greater and more urgent than they were before. If not managed from within the field, decisions about what is most important to preserve are likely to be imposed from without. And keep in mind that doing nothing—and losing irreplaceable materials or missing unrepeatable opportunities to capture traces of precious dance moments—also becomes, inadvertently, a policy decision.

The desire to help artists, cultural organizations, and cultural advocates take control of this decision-making process in dance preservation and documentation is what prompted the Trusts to create NIPAD. As a number of conferees noted previously, we started with a fairly reductive definition of “documentation and preservation,” because we needed to keep things simple in order to move forward, and because the field itself had not yet developed more complex definitions. NIPAD, and the participation of dance practitioners, scholars, and writers, along with the broader coalitions that have been built over the last decade, have produced more refined, flexible, and usable definitions on the basis of which we can all move forward.

Building resources for culture and cultural heritage, including dance and dance heritage, is an uphill and certainly long-term battle, but I believe that the arts and the other cultural domains will only gain the increased respect and resources that we seek from governments and philanthropies if we are willing to learn the tools of the advocacy trade, which includes garnering both reliable data and information, and compelling stories, as well as engaging the skilled advocates who can deploy both data and stories to good effect with decision makers. (This is how the environmental field has succeeded so spectacularly over the past twenty years.) The alternative is to continue to be held hostage by unsympathetic decision makers who tell their own negative stories, and use our lack of information, to paint an unfavorable picture of what the arts, humanities, heritage preservation, and folk life have to offer to the well-being of American society.

There is good news. We are learning from the efforts of the Trusts and others that one of the aspects of cultural activity that resonates most strongly with the general public is preserving cultural heritage. I will leak a bit of data from preliminary survey results from the Performing Arts Research Coalition (PARC, composed of Dance/USA, Theatre Communications Group, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Opera America, and the American Symphony Orchestra League).[note 5] PARC has just completed the first round of community household surveys in five pilot cities. The PARC program has also surveyed performing arts audiences and subscribers in those cities but the data I will cite comes from the household survey—that is, from people who do not necessarily attend any arts events. The survey asked a set of questions about the degree to which respondents valued the performing arts in their communities, whether or not they attended.

The two statements that received strong agreement from a majority of respondents across all of the five cities are: (1) the performing arts contribute to the education and development of children; and (2) the performing arts help preserve and share cultural heritage. Lowest on the list of eight characteristics of the performing arts to which respondents strongly agreed was that the performing arts contribute to the local economy. It is not clear whether this last finding reflects that the general public is not aware of all the economic impact studies, which hold such sway with local governments; that they don’t believe that economic impact is as important as education and preservation; or that they do believe that economic impact is important but they don’t believe that the performing arts actually contribute much.

I’m pretty confident, however, that the public interest in culture as a means of preserving and sharing cultural heritage is a solid finding—at least in these five cities. And I believe that this idea can form the basis for an argument that the public will be well served, and wants to be served, by the preservation of cultural heritage itself. Additionally, these findings suggest that it is time, at last, to shift the balance away from an overemphasis on instrumental arguments for the value of the arts to a more nuanced array of arguments that focus on the arts’ contributions in and of themselves—not just, for example, on their value as economic engines.

We also learn from Chris Dwyer’s study, which analyzed a series of successful efforts to increase public funding for culture at the state level, that government policymakers, as well as members of the public, find the preservation of cultural heritage a compelling argument for supporting cultural activities. Much of the work the Dwyer report documents is concerned with the preservation of buildings and sites. The idea that preserving what some in the field call an “intangible heritage” is equally valuable and important is newer and less familiar, but through efforts such as Save America’s Treasures, as well as the last decade of work in preserving dance heritage, it is gaining ground. The work you are doing provides some of the most sophisticated examples we have of why it is important, valuable, and feasible to document, preserve, and thereby transmit a living cultural heritage. You have great stories and they come with pictures, which is a huge advantage.

Something else we learn from the Dwyer report is that many of the most successful efforts to pry additional funds loose from state budgets—even when they were expanding in the late 1990s—depended upon combinations of several characteristics, including access to cultural resources to all citizens in rural as well as urban communities, and good stewardship of state resources. But I want to dwell upon two of the most important characteristics:

• They involved coalitions among multiple domains of culture. When the arts, humanities, preservation and folk life communities worked together, legislators could see culture as an important sector of community life, with a critical mass of programs and resources to offer (and an ability collectively to reach a lot of voters and taxpayers).
• They defined and built upon the central role of cultural activity in nurturing community identity and community characteristics unique to the state involved. Articulating a sense of place, a sense of community history, and a sense of creative identity are all ways in which this idea can be manifested.

You have created coalitions and networks that didn’t exist a decade ago, and this infrastructure of passion and intellect as well as information and action is the important—and essential—ground upon which you stand. Going forward, I urge you to consider thinking not only about sustaining and building the structure you have already created, but also about reaching out to other advocates and practitioners of cultural heritage preservation in other disciplines. You will find strength in their numbers and they will gain enormously from your expertise and your passion.

I want to talk about two more successes of NIPAD and of the larger dance heritage movement:

• You have created permanent access to a large body of preserved materials through libraries and archives. From some of the comments I’ve heard at this conference, this feels to some of you perhaps too passive. But in the long arc of history it may turn out to be the most important outcome of your work. Far into the future dancers, scholars, and interested members of the general public are likely to construct from your work an understanding of the relationship between our past and their present that we can’t even to imagine today.
• You have created increasingly sophisticated approaches to using both technology and performance to preserve dance: Dance for the camera as a means of documenting and transmitting the heart and soul of a performance, rather than only its steps; and as a way to draw new audiences across the media gulch that so bedevils this field. And you have engaged live performance as a way both to document and transmit a body of work, as well as to engage new audiences.

In sum, you have already developed many of the key elements of a sustainable field: a sophisticated body of knowledge and an array of technical tools; a network of individuals and institutions from which ever-stronger coalitions can be built; and a body of work from which you can draw to engage the interest and understanding of others and advocate for the importance—and unique, precious qualities—of your field.

I believe you can make cultural policy dance.

Marian A. Godfrey is Director of the Civic Life Initiatives of The Pew Charitable Trusts; from 1989 through 2003 she served as the Trusts’ Program Director for Culture. Previously, Ms. Godfrey was Manager of the theater collaborative Mabou Mines, for which she also produced a feature film, Dead End Kids: A Story of Nuclear Power (1980-86); Instructor in Drama at New York University Tisch School of the Arts (1980-87); Director of Development for Dance Theater Workshop (1983-85); and Managing Director of Ensemble Studio Theater (1977-80). She received her MFA in Theater Administration from the Yale School of Drama in 1975 and BA magna cum laude in English Literature from Radcliffe in 1970. Ms. Godfrey currently chairs the Arts Policy Roundtable of Americans for the Arts; previously she served on the boards of the Maine College of Art, Grantmakers in the Arts (chair, 2000-02) and Theatre Communications Group.