Funding for DANCE - federal aid to the arts

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1999 by Naima Prevots

Government patronage of the arts actually began over sixty-four years ago. What sources are available to companies and choreographers today?

Private support from wealthy individuals was essential to pioneering American choreographers and dancers as their art form developed between the two world wars. Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Martha Graham, and George Balanchine, among others, depended on wealthy patrons as well as on grueling cross-country tours and occasional ventures into Broadway and later Hollywood. But a revolutionary idea emerged during the Great Depression in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt--the notion that artists are workers and deserve to be paid by the government for the jobs they do. On April 8, 1935, Roosevelt signed the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, authorizing what eventually became the Works Projects Administration. The main premise of the WPA was that artists should be paid to do what they were trained to do.

Helen Tamiris, Charles Weidman, Doris Humphrey, Katherine Dunham, and Ruth Page were among those who produced new work under the auspices of the WPA. In some cases artists were sponsored in performances of existing work, including Graham, Hanya Holm, and Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan. The dance and theater components of the WPA were disbanded in 1939, when Congress decided that radical art was mining the country and that government sponsorship was creating hotbeds of Communism.

Another brief flurry of government activity in arts sponsorship occurred in 1940, one year before the United States entered World War II. Roosevelt saw the need to counter anti-American propaganda in Latin America; Nelson Rockefeller, whose official title was Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, was charged with developing short-term exchange initiatives. In 1941 he approached his friend Kirstein about sending a ballet company on a goodwill tour of the region.

American Ballet Caravan was created for the purpose, and the government agreed to underwrite all operating expenses if Kirstein would take care of production costs. The dancers were recruited from Kirstein's defunct Ballet Caravan, Balanchine's defunct American Ballet, and advanced students from their School of American Ballet. It is important to note that their companies had folded because Edward Warburg, a major backer, had withdrawn his patronage in 1938. It was for this tour that Balanchine created Ballet Imperial and Concerto Barocco, major works and his first ballets in pure dance form. American Ballet Caravan performed throughout Latin America for twenty-eight weeks at a cost of $100,000--the first example of an American government's support of dance.

The next federal patronage was again motivated by international politics, not an informed love of art. In 1951 and 1952, the State Department funded two short cultural festivals in Berlin to counteract the influence of the Soviets in occupied Germany. One of the highlights of the 1952 festival was the appearance of New York City Ballet, which performed to rave reviews. Two years later, in a letter written July 27, 1954, to the House Committee on Appropriations, President Dwight D. Eisenhower requested $5 million to "stimulate the presentation abroad by private firms and groups of the best American industrial and cultural achievements in order to demonstrate the dedication of the United States to peace and human well-being and to offset worldwide Communist propaganda charges that the United States has no culture." This peacetime proposal from a war hero was to have enormous positive impact on our dance companies, and was later a crucial influence on legislation to create the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. The 83rd Congress approved Eisenhower's request, and the president's Emergency Fund for International Affairs was created, with $2,250,000 allocated for the performing arts. This was the first time in the history of American public policy that choreographers, composers, playwrights, and their works were systematically funded for export.

The first company to tour was the Jose Limon Company (November 1954), with performances in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Montevideo. Southeast Asia was an area where America wanted to have a presence during the Cold War, and from October 1955 to February 1956, Graham and her company toured Burma, India, Pakistan, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Ceylon. The Limon and Graham tours had a significant impact at home and abroad. The American embassy sent a message to the State Department: "Limon Company top artistic and personal success." Prime Minister U Nu of Burma was very direct: "Artistes like Miss Graham can very effectively contribute toward international goodwill and therefore are a potent force for peace."

Decisions on which groups would tour were made by a dance panel that included, at different times through 1962, Kirstein, Agnes de Mille, Emily Coleman, Walter Terry, Lucia Chase, Doris Humphrey, Martha Hill, Margaret Lloyd, Lillian Moore, and Hanya Holm. Highlights of the program in its first decade included tours of the Soviet Union by American Ballet Theatre (1960) and NYCB (1962) and a tour of Australia and the Far East (1962) of a company headed by Alvin Ailey and Carmen de Lavallade.