Dance

Carla Peterson
Artistic director, Dance Theater Workshop

How do you think this crisis will impact the New York arts scene?
It makes sense that the big institutions are more worried than the smaller ones. Everybody in the field has something to worry about, but I think that the bigger institutions are going to be more worried because a bigger percentage of their contributing funders—corporate and individuals, public and private—have far deeper pockets than what Dance Theater Workshop has. The larger ones are going to feel the impact more quickly, and they may not have the ability to maneuver and respond and cope that smaller institutions and individual artists have. We’re going to suffer more of a trickle-down effect. It’s not necessarily going to hit us immediately—although it’s going to hit us. Of course, I’m speaking very generally, there’s always exceptions. I don’t want to romanticize that this is going to be fun, but the artists we tend to work with—artists who don’t have very much money or very many resources—are incredibly resourceful, not only on the level of making work but on the level of figuring how to survive in a city like New York. It may be that as we go down, more artists will start saying that New York has been getting tougher and tougher and tougher, and they’re gonna go. We might see more of that. I think there’s been a little bit more of that recently with artists going to Europe because the support system there goes much deeper. Although, Europe’s going to get hit by this as well.

Practically, what are some of the challenges DTW faces?
DTW already runs a pretty lean machine relative to administration. We have a relatively new building and there are costs, but in terms of infrastructure, we run an extremely tight ship and we’ve gotten it tighter and tighter before this hit. I’m not sure where we can cut any more than what we’ve already done. We’re really committed to continuing our programming; if we have to figure out some way of cutting, we’re going to figure out how to do it in some other way. It’s extremely important for us to continue to service the arts community. The other thing is that nationally a lot of presenters will tend to pull back from more experimental work because they can’t sell it to their audiences. The audiences are saving their money, they’re not going to go to something they’re not familiar with. The presenters tend to also pull back on international programming. We’re really going to try to not do that, because that’s sort of the soul of DTW—we have to protect our mission. When one starts to cut back on programming, there’s a kind of spiraling effect: You have less people coming into your facility, interest over time starts to recede, it becomes harder to get funders excited about what you’re doing. So there’s real pragmatic reasons beyond our commitment to the artists community.

Looking at how well cultural institutions tend to be run, it’s a wonder Wall Street firms don’t look at them for tips.
Artists are really good problem-solvers. The population at large in this country doesn’t consider them essential or important to the societal, political or cultural fabric, but they are. There’s a tendency to patronize, infantilize artists but they are not to be patronized—they figure it out. Yeah, it’s going to be harder, but I think that art itself will prevail.

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