The Changing Face of the Arts : The artist’s relationship to society is less like the agony and the ecstasy and more like the marketing and the minutiae.

We all know the stereotypes. Charlton Heston as the raging Michelangelo, sweating bullets to complete the Sistine Chapel ceiling in defiance of church bureaucrats. Kirk Douglas as the passionate, tragic Vincent van Gogh, relentlessly contemptuous of social convention. Very glamorous and dramatic portraits, sketched in high-contrast oppositions.

But in the face of current economic realities, the artist’s relationship to society is more complex and interdependent--less like the agony and the ecstasy and more like the marketing and the minutiae.

Art is a business. And like every sector of the business community, it has been left by the current recession in economic disarray. Nonprofit arts organizations across the nation are closing their doors at an alarming rate.

In 1990, a New York-based survey titled “The Quiet Crisis in the Arts” concluded: “Those who assert that the arts need to be more like business and government should take note that the arts have achieved this rather dubious goal--we are deeply and dangerously in debt.”

The nationwide crisis in the arts is clearly reflected in the fortunes of arts groups in Ventura County. From large institutions like the Ventura County Symphony to humble community theaters and dance troupes, everyone is feeling the pinch.

A local survey of arts organizations reveals a combination of frustration and resourcefulness in response to the recession. Many groups have had to use extraordinary ingenuity to stay afloat. For others, time may be running out.

Symphony in Pain

This has been a particularly hard year for the area’s flagship arts organization, the Ventura County Symphony, according to executive director Karine Beesley.

“Our ticket sales have hit the lowest point they’ve ever been,” she said recently. “For example, the ‘Nutcracker’ ballet that we do every December with the Channel Islands Ballet Company has been on a steady uphill climb since we started it back in 1981. But in 1991 we barely broke even--and we’d never done that before.”

In response, the symphony is changing its tune with the arrival of its new music director, Boris Brott. Brott and Beesley are enthusiastic about the changes they’re making to the entire symphony experience, including acoustical and aesthetic improvements to the Oxnard Civic Auditorium and the incorporation of multimedia video, theater and dance elements into their concerts.

“This opens the door to collaboration with other arts groups in the community,” said Beesley.

But for groups with fewer resources than the symphony, the options are limited. Just last month, the Cabrillo Music Theatre canceled its scheduled production of “Annie” and suspended operations for a massive regrouping and fund-raising effort. The outcome will reportedly determine whether the group will continue.

Last May, the Channel Islands Ballet faced a similar crisis, according to Ishmael Messer, president of the company’s board of directors.

“We were ready to give up and donate our remaining funds to some other company,” Messer said, “but we found a new approach to possibly increase our revenue.” The company is now affiliated with the newly formed Ballet Ventura School, where internationally acclaimed Romanian dancer Clarissa Boeriu will serve as head instructor as well as artistic director for the performances.

Other organizations have had to implement a variety of downsizing measures. The Plexus Dance Company, for example, is on self-imposed hiatus but continues to operate as a new smaller-scale ensemble, Moda Viv, in works designed for gallery-sized performance spaces.

Pam Pilkenton, artistic director for Plexus, is a former Broadway dancer who said she loves living in Ventura County but is fast approaching the point where she’d consider leaving.

“I want to make a living from practicing my craft,” she said. “There comes a point where you have to maintain your integrity--like in a bad marriage, you may just have to go.”

Still, she hangs on. As with so many artists in the area, there’s a bond of loyalty that keeps her here, even though other communities offer more arts support.

“The annual operating budget for a typical Ventura arts organization is only $20,000,” said Sonia Tower of the City Parks and Recreation Department. “That has to cover staffing, advertising, printing programs, hiring performers, Xeroxing--you name it.”

Ironically, having to make do with this perpetual lack of funds may be one reason community arts groups have been so resilient in the face of the recession. Better-funded organizations are vulnerable to large-scale cutbacks from the grant agencies and donors on which most Ventura County arts groups have never relied.

“You can’t lose what you never had,” said Tower.

Bradon McKinley, president of the board for the Plaza Players theater company, concurred. “We’ve been on a shoestring for 46 years so it’s no different now,” he said with a laugh. “We always need money.”

To pay their bills, the Plaza Players need to average 30 paid attendees per night in their 130-seat theater in the downtown Livery Arts Center.

“Put it this way--currently, we’re paying the bills,” said McKinley. “Barely.”

But he also reports a recent increase in attendance for company auditions and performances.

“We thought we’d have a hard time in August when we compete with the county fair, but we had one of our best runs ever,” he said. He attributed the increase to “a general need to fill the emptiness of the recession with a quest for culture.”

Nevertheless, McKinley is less optimistic about the prospects for tangible benefits from the city of Ventura’s newly adopted Cultural Plan (see accompanying story). “I think it’s going to be a hollow cry. The arts get lip service but not much in the way of public funds. I doubt the City Council will give any dollars.”

But McKinley believes that the city can support the arts in ways that don’t carry a big price tag, like relaxing the city restrictions on signage in the downtown area.

“We’ve been really pushing for display banners that span the street, like you see in Ojai promoting their festivals. They could be made of breakaway materials that won’t impede fire trucks. But right now (the City Council) can’t even get it together to approve flower vendors on the street.”

Hope in Alliances

A tried and true survival strategy for arts organizations is forming strategic alliances with outside programs and agencies.

For Cindy Zimmerman, the new executive director of the Ventura Arts Council, tying the cultural development to the issue of downtown revitalization is a major goal.

“There’s a definite relationship between the cultural climate and the health of the business climate. Look what cities like Santa Barbara and Santa Monica have done in reviving their downtown areas,” she said.

Zimmerman recently replaced Laura Zucker as the head of the arts council, a private nonprofit agency funded mainly through a contract with the city of Ventura. While the council’s main focus lies within the city, Zimmerman also intends to provide some countywide support, particularly in the area of technical assistance to instruct arts groups in successful organizational and promotional strategies.

The current climate, Zimmerman said, has some benefits for the arts organizations that do manage to flourish.

“Not having an established arts infrastructure means there are more possibilities,” she said. “The best chances for fostering Ventura’s cultural climate will come from creativity at the local level.”

Zimmerman’s goals for the council include continuing and furthering strategic alliances between the arts and other high-priority community interests, particularly in the social services area.

For example, Zimmerman points to the recently completed mural at the downtown Livery Arts Center--a project in which two professional artists (M. B. Hanrahan and Michele Chapin) designed and supervised the painting by clients in the Turning Point program for the homeless mentally ill.

“We’re working on a lot of projects to jointly sponsor with the city’s youth programs” she added.

The first of these projects will be the Dia de los Muertos celebration on Nov. 1. The event will include a traditional processional through downtown Ventura, as well as ritual theater, dance and a general carnival in accordance with the traditional Mexican “Day of the Dead” festival.

The multimedia event will be co-sponsored by the arts council and the Westpark Recreation Center’s Youth at Risk/Gang Prevention Program. Participants from the Westpark program as well as the community at large have been enlisted in a massive project to prepare masks, costumes and decorations for the festival.

The event coordinator, Oxnard artist and teacher Javier Gomez, views this as a positive response to gang and crime problems. For the past nine years he has staged Day of the Dead festivals in cities throughout Ventura County. “We’ve done it in Oxnard, Saticoy, Moorpark, Santa Paula, Fillmore, Ojai--even in communities without a large Latino population, we’re interested in sharing what we know and what we’re about.”

A number of local artists will also be contributing to the Dia de los Muertos festival, which Zimmerman hopes will help foster a spirit of cooperation rather than competition between arts groups.

“The atmosphere of collaboration proposed in the Cultural Plan is a good road map,” she said. “I don’t think we’re there yet. The tendency in all of Southern California is for people to exist as islands--geographic, ethnic, personal and organizational. So some arts organizations have yet to see ways in which they can help each other.”

Signs of Progress

But there are signs of progress in the area of cooperation.

Dana Elcar, a well-known actor and co-founder of the Santa Paula Theatre Center, is a leading advocate of mutual support in the arts.

Elcar strongly advocates a system of joint advertising in local newspapers and in theater lobbies, modeled on the mutual promotion strategies adopted by small Equity waiver theater companies in the Los Angeles area.

“It would get all the theaters and arts groups a daily listing for very little money each--and audiences could easily make a choice.”

Another important survival strategy, said Elcar, is the exchange of mailing lists that allows each participating group to reach more people with interest in the arts. “That’s an important breakthrough since there’s this tendency to be jealous of their lists,” said Elcar. “Working together can also provide collective bargaining for lower insurance rates--it’s been tried and proven in L.A.”

Elcar also emphasized the importance of fostering community acceptance of arts projects in communities other than one’s own.

“It’s not healthy to be narrowly regional,” he pointed out, “like when you produce a play in Oxnard, but people from, say, Fillmore don’t think it’s proper to go--they just attend their own plays. There has to be a breaking down of those barriers so that there can be sufficient funding for first-rate events. We need to trust that its OK to mix with each other.”

A proposed monthlong arts festival, still in the planning stages but tentatively scheduled for October, 1993, would give a major boost to countywide arts awareness. Elcar is a member of the festival planning committee.

“The festival would bring people to Simi for one event, Ventura for another, and another in Ojai, and they’d discover that it doesn’t take that long to get from Simi to Ventura. They’d begin to feel at home in the whole county, not just in their own neighborhood.”

One of Ventura County’s most prominent theater companies, Elcar’s Santa Paula Theatre Center has maintained a relatively steady average attendance through the current economic downturn. But box office sales only cover 60% to 65% of the company’s operating costs.

“It’s harder to get the other funding that’s required to maintain the standards of work we’ve been doing,” Elcar admitted. “We’ve been able to get by without compromising the quality--the production and the acting--but it has impacted our ability to be a complete theater. We’ve cut back in advertising, so we can’t develop our audiences as much.”

To increase efficient use of their facility, on Tuesday the Santa Paula Theatre Center opened an auxiliary performance space reclaimed from a room in back of the main stage area. Intended for smaller scale theater, semi-staged readings, musical events and some experimental works, the new Back Stage will be used Sunday, Monday and Tuesday evenings when the main stage is dark.

Basically, Elcar’s mood is one of cautious optimism. “The whole country is in a slump,” he said. “But if you have a will to survive, if you have a positive attitude about the work you’re doing, and if you’re really willing to share with other people, you’ll find that the benefits are really enormous coming back your way.”