Community-Building
Just as rural and inner-city artists value tradition, so both are conscious of the interdependent lives of their community's members. This awareness encourages these tradition-bearers to become community-builders as well. Their artmaking (both its products and its process) often explicitly seeks to affect the quality of life for the people around them. An artist must be highly functional to accomplish his or her work, and this is an attractive quality in communities experiencing dysfunction. For inner-city and rural artists, crying needs are hard to tune out, even as the artist realizes that a solution is far beyond his or her capacity. What often results are community partnerships between such artists and their community's educators, health care providers, criminal justice workers, social service agents, and others. Given their druthers, some inner-city and rural artists might prefer to practice art for art's sake, but they would have to relocate to do it.

By their nature, such artist-community partnerships are intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and action-oriented, so it's not surprising that these same traits show up in the practice of these artists. In the South Bronx, there is now hip-hop theater, and it places audience participation, not cool spectatorship, at the center of the experience. Jazz, in its popular swing era, included different generations both on and off the stage. Every performance night at the storied Savoy Ballroom (also in the South Bronx), the band was swinging the dancers and the dancers were swinging the band. By reports, it was a subtle exchange that produced an infectious art form. Ralph Ellison goes so far as to argue that when jazz retreated from this grand interplay with dance, it lost its opportunity to be the occasion for the fulfillment of the American ideal, e pluribus unum.

Oral Tradition
Oral traditions are equally important to both inner-city and rural artists, because both find that most of their culture's literature and history is not in books. It exists in the stories and oral histories known by community members. For example, without the New Deal's WPA Oral History Project, we would have almost no African-American slave narratives.

Oral traditions affect not only the content but the form of the theater created by inner-city and rural artists. For example, the oral form frees the audience to talk and sing back to the actors, much like the call-and-response in southern church services. This is in contrast to the literary tradition of their suburban and urban counterparts, where an imaginary fourth wall usually divides the performer from the spectator.

The Puerto Rican, Appalachian, and African-American theater artists who participated in our collaboration believed in these values of tradition, community-building, and story. The three companies agreed from the outset to create a play that caused their cultures to interact in a novel way at the same time that it strengthened each culture's tradition. Such a premise necessarily elevates the importance of process, so six years was not viewed as an overly long period for the project.

The initial two years of our three-way collaboration were spent visiting, in round-robin fashion, one another's communities in order to learn about each other's audience and local issues, as well as one another's performance aesthetic. Stories, and a particular story circle methodology that the companies developed, were used in all phases of the project-to build trust among the artists and with audiences as well as to develop the script.

Mobility
We were the first white theater that the Puerto Rican company had presented, so they were understandably unsure about how to pitch us to their community. As it turned out, the connection was the mountains-the mountains of Puerto Rico and the mountains of Appalachia. The performances were packed, and afterwards there were spirited discussions about the merits of island versus Appalachian moonshine, ways to cook chicken, the hard times for family farming, and many other subjects that engage rural people wherever they meet.

Another recent collaboration underscores the rural roots of many inner-city dwellers. It occurred in California's East Bay Richmond District, in a former shipbuilding section known as the Iron Triangle. After rehearsal one night, we were invited to a Mien (Laotian) family's house for dinner. The fish had been caught by one of the family members that day, and the tasty greens harvested from an abandoned neighborhood lot. The drink wasn't homemade, however, but expensive Scotch, which flowed continuously. Toasting our host, I pointed out that in his birth country he had been a leading professional singer, was now a janitor, but after our project was certain to achieve the status of folk artist. For those of us around the table that night in the Triangle, it was easy to imagine that "rural" was really a spiritual state, dependent on daily contact with the natural world.

Shared Needs
At first it might seem that the needs of artists in wide open spaces and close neighborhoods would be significantly different, but in my experience there are far more similarities than differences. For example, both lack sufficient markets and training opportunities. Often key partners and collaborators, such as producers, agents, and curators, don't exist in either setting. Without advocates, without scholars interested in documenting their work, without meaningful criticism, both rural and inner-city artists often feel that the real not-for-profit arts infrastructure lies just beyond their reach.

There are, of course, different realities that affect inner-city and rural artists, such as the high cost of office, rehearsal, and performance space in cities and population declines in rural areas. In the 1990s, half the rural communities in the United States lost population and faced declining employment growth-just as real estate in our largest cities was going sky-high.

A recent Rand-Pew study of arts organizations hypothesizes a future in which mid-sized organizations collapse under intense pressure, leaving small, mostly volunteer organizations on the one hand, and large, rich, star-driven institutions on the other. There are reasons to think that this scenario is unfolding. Across the nation and with few exceptions, mid-sized inner-city and rural arts organizations are hurting-and some have already closed. It figures that such organizations would feel the pressure first, because their audiences are of modest means. It is also worth remembering that there are no large, not-for-profit performing arts institutions dedicated to serving the 85 percent majority.

Many young aspiring artists whom I meet, whether in the city or in the country, do not regard the not-for-profit arts sector as a viable option. Those not drawn to the commercial arts sector accept that their "day jobs" will have to subsidize their art. For them, the not-for-profit world offers more problems than solutions: poor wages, inadequate training, a low tolerance for innovation accompanied by lots of bureaucracy, and little opportunity for advancement and leadership. Some of this attitude can be chalked up to issues of generational succession, but I suspect not all of it. Has anyone been tracking the number of not-for-profit start-ups by age of founders?

My 26-year-old daughter earns her living as an historian in New York City and devotes several hours a day to dance. Her studio, founded by a West African dancer brought to the United States to become part of the Alvin Ailey Company, has its 501c3 tax-exempt status but hasn't received any grants. It doesn't have the staff to deal with all the proposal apparatus, and, although among dancers it has the reputation as the leading studio teaching Dunham technique, it isn't known by most of Manhattan's not-for-profit dance organizations. My daughter checked out half a dozen other studios and says that there's no comparison: at her studio the dancers are diverse by about any measure, the music is always live, and the instruction is rigorous and effective, and the studio's public presentations take place in Harlem for a broad audience.

Support Systems
For inner-city and rural artists working in the not-for-profit sector, public agencies and private foundations are the two main sources of contributed income. Such artists are usually without wealthy patrons. Sales of goods and services make up the rest of the artist's livelihood.

Public agencies, especially at the federal level, have had the most favorable impact on rural and inner-city artists in the past 75 years. This impact has been in both dollars and advocacy. Before the national endowments for the arts and humanities, there was the New Deal's WPA and its federal arts projects. My theater owes its start to the 1960s' Office of Economic Opportunity's war on poverty. (At that time, all poor people, regardless of race or ethnicity, were classified by the feds as minorities.) The Department of Labor's national job training program (CETA) in the 1970s was responsible for the start of many other inner-city and rural arts organizations. CETA arguably had more impact on this part of the arts field than the combined efforts of the two national endowments. Inner-city and rural artists continue to seek support from a variety of federal agencies, such as the departments of Education and Justice.

Unfortunately for states-rights idealists (I was once one), local, state, and regional public support for rural and inner-city artists has been mostly a trickle-down affair, dependent on federal leadership and fiscal incentives. Just as the Justice Department was the most committed government advocate for desegregation, so the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been the most consistent public advocate for rural and inner-city artists. My theater company received federal arts support for several years before the state abandoned its position that eastern Kentucky was genetically incapable of producing a professional theater.

Championing rural and inner-city artists at the Arts Endowment were the directors and staffs of the Expansion Arts and Folk Arts programs (neither of which now exists). Expansion Arts was a legacy of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty. Its mission was to support artists and arts organizations that were of, by, and for inner-city, rural, and tribal communities. The Folk Arts program supported traditional artists who learned their craft from their community, neighbors, and family members, as opposed to training in the fine arts academies. Of course, this folk art approach to training is how the majority of artists from rural and inner-city communities learn their craft. The pursuit of artistic excellence was an integral part of both programs, and both were a steady voice for a national policy of inclusion and equal opportunity.

This advocacy influenced not only other public agencies at state, local, and regional levels, but private foundations as well. New foundation staff regularly came to the NEA to understand how a particular discipline was defined and to learn about issues and opportunities. As the most inclusive funding body in the not-for-profit arts sector, the NEA was important in setting both an open tone and wide perimeters. With the demise of federal leadership, fewer funding sources, private or public, are concerned about rural and inner-city artists, and those that are tend to operate inconsistently: too often their commitment is short-lived and their approach not derived from an ongoing and meaningful dialogue with potential grantees.

In the past several decades, it was best for rural and inner-city artists when there were strong public-private partnerships. For example, the Ruth Mott Fund's most frequent funding partner was the NEA's Folk Arts program. At the center of this sustained 17-year collaboration was the exchange and building of knowledge about the field's realities.

Now, without federal leadership, inner-city and rural artists are left to cobble together their funding from many small sources, which is expensive. Even in the stable organizations serving wealthy audiences, the artist remains at the low end of the organizational pay scale. Increasingly, a disorganized, fragmented, and underfinanced support system appears as the reality facing all artists. I think that it is fair to ask not only on what specific information, but on what channels of information foundation staff and trustees base their policy. Presently without seats at the not-for-profit decision-making tables, artists are left fighting one another for scarce resources-an ultimately self-defeating exercise.

Conclusion
From my perspective of 26 years in the arts, the future has never looked bleaker for not-for-profit performing artists, perhaps generally, and certainly for those whose audience is not the wealthiest 15 percent. Not-for-profit is a significant qualifier here, because the commercial sector and the unincorporated arts sector continue to provide plenty of opportunities. But 20 years of sustained political attack on its values, diminished public investment, and growing cultural isolationism in the country as a whole have taken their toll on the not-for-profit arts. The sector's current lack of leadership, its elite audience, its inability to build and communicate knowledge about its practice, and the fact that young artists are turning away from it, all indicate the seriousness of the problem.

One could argue that there is nothing wrong with the commercial and unincorporated arts sectors taking up the slack, but that would be to concede that the independent sector has no unique and important role to play in a democracy. Wholly subject neither to market pressures nor to political exigencies, the independent sector should combine the entrepreneurship of successful private business with the sole public purpose of benefiting society. The question is whether the current and emerging leadership of the not-for-profit arts community will reassert this special character and reclaim the hope and potential that this sector uniquely represents.

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