Faced with drops in income in the current recession, collaboration is one means that arts organizations are using to weather the storm.
Photo by Mark Gluckman
Arizona Jewish Theatre Company's decision in April to cancel the last show of its 2008-2009 season was one of the most visible signs of the effects of the current American recession on Arizona arts organizations, but it was not the only one.
"I'm very concerned," said Rabbi Albert Plotkin, when discussing how the economy has affected the Sylvia Plotkin Judaica Museum in Scottsdale. He is the director of the museum named after his late wife and housed at Congregation Beth Israel, where he is rabbi emeritus. "(The museum) has been deeply affected. We couldn't even go out to ask for more donations because it would have been a futile venture."
Donors are a substantial part of the mix for many arts and cultural organizations, and when the crisis in the financial markets erupted in fall 2008, many donors' investment portfolios were severely affected.
Arts organizations contacted by Jewish News all said that donations were down in the current recession. In addition, most of them had seen drops in public funding, subscriptions and attendance.
"The biggest thing that has happened to us (as a result of the recession) is the just-about 50 percent cut from the city and state," said Janet Arnold, AJTC's producing director. "Those were our largest contributors, and we don't know how we're going to replace that."
In addition, the troupe saw a drop in ticket sales and attendance last season.
In response, AJTC has cut staff by half a full-time position ("There used to be two-and-a-half of us in the office and now there are two," she said), and the landlord has lowered the troupe's rent. The troupe's income mix is usually 60 percent earned (subscription and single-ticket sales) and 40 percent contributions (donors, corporate sponsors and public funding), Arnold said. "So we're out there looking for additional funding."
A series of surveys by the Arizona Commission on the Arts has shown that the recession has forced layoffs, programming cuts and reductions in operating budgets across a broad spectrum of arts organizations in the state.
The commission has been conducting the survey "to keep track of how (the organizations are) being affected by the recession" on roughly a quarterly basis this year, said Casey Blake, the commission's communications and research director. The most recent was in May, with another due to be taken next month, she said.
The May survey was sent to more than 300 organizations. Among the 160 that responded, 60 percent said they have reduced their operating budget for the current year by as much as 80 percent. Of organizations with annual operations of $250,000 or more, 40 percent had laid off staff in the preceding six months, while 50 percent froze hiring and 25 percent put staff furloughs in place.
As a response to such challenges, the commission is administering the Arizona Arts Job Preservation Program. The commission just closed the grant application process for fiscal years 2010 and 2011. The grants will be funded by money from the federal economic stimulus package, Blake said.
The recession's effects were seen very quickly by Arizona Theatre Company, said Kevin Moore, the company's managing director.
"Around October ... last year when all this bailout talk was going on, subscriptions came to a screaming halt," he said, even though subscription sales had been going well before then. For performing arts organizations, subscriptions (as opposed to single-ticket sales) ensure good cash flow. Moore said that ATC's funding mix is about 60 percent subscriptions, 20 percent single-ticket sales and 20 percent contributions.
To deal with the crisis last season, "We cut about half a million dollars out of the budget," Moore said. "Almost all of that was on the back of the administrative side." ATC instituted furlough days, suspended retirement benefits for some of its staff and froze hiring for positions left open by attrition, he said. "Fortunately, we didn't have to lay anyone off."
The budget for the upcoming season was originally pegged at $7.3 million, but ATC cut $1.1 million from that, Moore said. The company is staging six of its own productions as usual, but they will be smaller shows that cost less to put on, he said.
Instead of furloughs, ATC has cut salaries by 5 percent across the board, he added. It also will not bring in shows from elsewhere as it did last year with "King Henry V."
"We did protect our programming as much as possible," he said.
Keeping programming intact guided Arizona Opera's budgeting as well, said Joel Revzen, the opera's artistic director. "We've made budget reductions based on the economy, but none of them have been in programming." The cuts have been on the administrative side, he said.
For this season, the opera has eliminated Thursday night performances, but, Revzen said, Thursday had long been a weak night for drawing audiences.
Unlike ATC, Arizona Opera did not see subscriptions come to a screeching halt. "Where we struggled was with contributed income," Revzen said. "People who lost their portfolios (in the financial markets meltdown) were not able to be as philanthropically generous. That's where we had a challenge."
Subscription and single-ticket sales represent about 46 percent of his organization's income, with the rest coming from contributions - private and corporate donors and public funding. "We depend mostly on individual gifts," he said.
The audience for the opera remains strong, Revzen added: "The good news is that our audiences love what we do. We're doing well."
On the other hand, Matt Lehrman began noticing "a seismic change" in audience interest in most arts events in April 2008. Lehrman is the executive director of Alliance for Audience, a Phoenix-based nonprofit that provides marketing and audience development services to the Arizona's arts community. In that capacity, it operates a Web site called showup.com, which provides information on and ticketing for cultural events and exhibitions (see story on Page S20).
Lehrman said from the time the site went up in November 2004 through March 2008, visitors to the site checked in an average of four times per month, presumably seeking information on or tickets for events and exhibitions.
"In April of 2008, we noticed a major change," Lehrman said. The average hovered around 2.5 to three visits per month from April 2008 through most of this year, he said, even though the number of visitors to the site continued to grow. Lehrman concluded that this meant that as a result of the recession, visitors were thinking, "At least once a month, I'm not going out, I'm not spending money, I'm not even going to be tempted."
When the Arizona Commission on the Arts held its 32nd Southwest Arts Conference last weekend in Carefree, a substantial portion of the program focused on providing arts organizations and artists the practical skills needed to survive "during a time when things aren't easy - not that it's ever easy, but it's more challenging than before," Blake said. Among new models of doing business discussed were mergers and partnerships, she said.
The Greater Phoenix Jewish Film Festival (gpjff.org), the product of a merger between the former Phoenix Jewish Film Festival and the East Valley Jewish Film Festival, didn't come about as a result of the recession, but in their final years as separate entities both festivals lost major funding, said Jerry Mittelman, the festival's executive director.
"We began to work on the merger in the fall of 2007, and at that point everything was good in the economy, but (as the recession hit, the merger) turned out to be a serendipitous thing," he said. With the merger, the festival has more hands on deck for a more intensified fundraising effort, he said.
Contributions have represented about 60 to 65 percent of the festivals' income in the past, with ticket sales representing the rest, he said.
"If we have a break-even year, then we're doing well," he said.
Meanwhile, collaborations are good news for Arizona Jewish Theatre Company, Arnold said. The troupe will be collaborating with the Valley of the Sun Jewish Community Center on children's theater, and AJTC's teen improvisation troupe will work with Jess Schwartz Jewish Community Day School.
Despite the tendency to cut back on the arts during a recession, Lehrman said, "They are just as vital as a library or an educational institution or a school," he said. "In a democracy, citizens are supposed to pay attention to the perspectives of others. I love that when I'm looking at art, I'm actually seeing the world through someone else's eyes."
