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When artists wrestle with livelihood we wrestle with one of the great wounded angels of western society: the split between spirit and matter. In Money and the Meaning of Life, Jacob Needleman suggests that, in our culture, money is a metaphor for the material world and art is a metaphor for the realm of the spirit. Like many dance artists, my work explores how spirit manifests in the material form of a body. Paying conscious attention to my body and paying conscious attention to livelihood are two related responsibilities of embodied life.
In the late 1980s, the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce invited me to do annual presentations on The Economic Realities of My Life as Arts Labor. I was ten years into a career as an independent choreographer, and I had done as well by the presenting and funding system as any of my peers in the Midwestern United States. My work had been produced in Europe and New York; it had been funded (and rejected) by all the obvious sources I was eligible to apply to. Click here for
For the Chamber of Commerce presentations I charted my annual income for twelve years, subtracted production costs of my theatrical work, and calculated what I actually lived on between 1977 and 1989. The results were sobering: the year I was most successful by traditional art career standards (my work was produced internationally, received positive national reviews, and was named Best of the Arts in local papers), I earned less than my first year out of college working part-time as a secretary.
As I looked at the financial trajectory for my future, it was painfully clear that I could not afford to get any more successful. Without consistent financial subsidy it was unlikely I could stay at the level I was working, never mind expand the scale of my choreographic work. (My husband's salary covered 2/3 of our joint living expenses; my income covered 1/3, primarily from my university teaching positions. Click here for )
When I took a hard look at the funding system for independent artists, I decided I did not want to subsidize my life by competing against peers, for limited resources, in the fickle climate of funding trends. As a woman, I also did not want a semi-dependent economic position in my marriage.
Projects like Creative Economy helped me to re-think my economic paradigm as a working artist. Rather than sell performance pieces to presenters (I call this my "art widget" paradigm), I began to use performance as research and development tool, and to put my information into the marketplace as a consultant. Click here for
I developed body-based programs for coping with organizational change, creativity and innovation, facilitation, wellness, stress management and leadership development. As an adjunct facilitator with Synectics, Inc., I introduced physical movement into new product development sessions with companies like General Mills and American Express. (Synectics is an international consulting firm specializing in business innovation since 1960.)
One of my favorite job titles was naïve resource for organizations and companies that were searching for fresh ideas. As naïve resource, I sat in on strategic planning processes or innovation sessions for industries I knew nothing about. My role was to ask the obvious questions that can lead to breakthrough ideas. Working with business taught me to include the workplace in my definition of community. For an example of a movement-based exercise for idea generation in the workplace, click on
