In Charleston, the symphony orchestra has reduced the salaries of its musicians and staff by cutting its concert season by two months. In New York, the Metropolitan Opera has slashed its 11 scheduled performances to eight. Plans for new museums in Nevada and Ohio have been put on indefinite hold. In California, the Sacramento Ballet cancelled the remainder of its 2009-10 season, while the Baltimore Opera has filed for Chapter 11 protection and, further north, the 67-year-old Connecticut Opera has closed for good.

Across the country, theaters are shutting their doors or laying people off; orchestras, suffering from steep losses in their endowment funds, are scaling back performances or closing altogether; and everyone else in the arts — from small, independent galleries to museums in major cities — is feeling the pinch of the distressed economy.

In the Midlands, the economic impact of the arts is enormous, generating about $56 million in total annual spending and employing more than 2,200 people, according to a 2007 study conducted by Americans for the Arts for the Cultural Council of Richland and Lexington Counties. But cuts are here: the City of Columbia already has told arts organizations that funding from hospitality tax revenues will be cut 25 percent in the coming fiscal year.

Previously steady corporate and individual donors are giving less, too. The cuts come even as the arts are crucial to ongoing economic development efforts, because companies want to ensure that their executives and employees will have access to a high-quality cultural life.

From left to right: Wim Roefs, Jim Thigpen, Kay Thigpen, Rhonda Hunsinger and Ken May. Photo by Jonathan Sharpe

Clearly, arts organizations large and small are feeling the pinch from a drop-off in both public and private giving, all against a backdrop of worsening forecasts and, thanks to recent major cuts in The State’s newsroom, potentially less media coverage than at any time in recent history. With these factors in mind, Free Times invited local arts leaders to a roundtable discussion to talk about the state of the arts in Columbia; specifically, what’s working, what’s not and what the future holds as arts leaders brace themselves for the worst.

Present for the discussion were Rhonda Hunsinger, executive director of the South Carolina Philharmonic; Morihiko Nakahara, music director of the Philharmonic; Ken May, deputy director of the S.C. Arts Commission; Jim and Kay Thigpen, owners of Trustus Theater; and Wim Roefs, board chairman of the 701 Center for the Contemporary Arts and owner of if ART Gallery. Following is an edited transcript.

FT: In this economic climate, how has fundraising been going for each of you?
 
Ken May: Well, this year we’ve gotten several major cuts [at the S.C. Arts Commission] and cumulatively now we’ve had about 25 percent of our state appropriations cut. That translates into cuts for our grantees, so everybody who gets grants from us feels the effects of the cuts we’ve gotten. We’re told that the loss in state revenues that occurred in the first half of the fiscal year [was] really the result of changes in tax policy and not the recession itself, so the recession is still to go, which is pretty chilling since already we’ve seen such deep cuts.

We’ve done some surveying of our grantees to determine what kind of impact there will be at given levels of cuts, and there are varying responses. Our cuts aren’t make-it-or-break-it for a number of our grantees, but they’re important to a lot of them. For some, it’s kind of ‘Eh,’ and for others it’s, “My god, we’re going to have to fire somebody or we might go out of business.”

FT: For those who don’t know, can you talk a little about what the South Carolina Arts Commission’s role is?

We give operating support, which is kind of unrestricted, “use it as you need to use it” [funding] to about 139 arts organizations across the state. Most of the counties in the state have something. What we’re hearing from a lot of those grantees is that so far things like ticket sales are really not doing badly. Our general responses aren’t so bad on the earned income side. Some groups in Columbia, in fact, are having very good years with extraordinary ticket sales and entrance fees. But on the donated revenue side is where they’re really feeling the hurt.

Depending on what kind of organization you are, you’re more or less reliant on that. If you’re a community theater, you’re probably not very dependent on donated income, but if you’re an arts council or, say, an organization that doesn’t charge admission, you’re extremely reliant on grants and donations.

Rhonda Hunsinger: Our board president [at the Philharmonic] said it best a few weeks ago. He said it’s the best of times and the worst of times, to throw some Dickens in there. On one hand, because of the success of our search [for a new music director] and the exposure and the terrific music and the quality of the product, we’re having probably one of the best seasons in a decade. It’s fantastic, and attendance is at a record high. Typically, [however], ticket income only covers about 35 percent of our budget; all the rest has to be donated.

We’re actually doing a fundraising feasibility study right now to really find out what’s going on out there and how it’s going to impact us. So, from an audience perspective, things are fantastic. Artistically, it’s the best time the Philharmonic has ever had.

Kay Thigpen: For us [at Trustus Theatre], it’s pretty much an up-and-down situation. I open my emails every day and read about another theater group somewhere in the United States that’s shutting its doors or laying off people or trying to sell its lights. Plays for us, like a musical like Evita, we have no trouble selling tickets to at all. But the more serious plays that we like to do, maybe half to three-quarter houses. Thankfully we have things like our half-price student tickets, so we’re getting a big increase in that kind of thing.

As far as corporate giving, that definitely is down. We’ve had a lot of people interested at the beginning of the year, but nobody ever got back to me. It was kind of a wait-and-see type thing. Some months we’re holding on by the skin of our teeth, other months we’re doing OK.

FT: Does finding that balance between private and public funding directly affect your programming choices?

Jim Thigpen: It does affect programming. Over the years, we have [developed] a niche like everyone else does. We’re not a strictly community theater. But our niche has always been filling the gaps that aren’t going to be filled by the university or community theaters. They have very different missions. We have kind of a fun rule at Trustus — the better the literature, the more Pulitzers or Tonys or whatever, the less the audience. It’s an absolute guarantee.

You can’t sell head candy, so that affects next year. I’m looking at it and I have to plan on it getting worse, not better. So when we’re planning now, I look at the plays and [usually] we do one or two musicals a year, max. I’m looking at up to almost five musicals for next season. Some of them might be smaller than normal ones, but they’re hot properties.
Hopefully we’re not selling our souls totally, because they are shows that community theaters probably wouldn’t do, but still, for us, five musicals? That’s incredible.

And then there’s the difficulty in finding the staff to do that many musicals. We can find the directors, but really good musical people are fairly rare, so the economy is making our season decisions for us. Plus, this is our 25th season, and we had planned to celebrate a little bit with some of our favorites from the past, but that gets kind of scary because all our favorites are the ‘dead baby’ shows. We can’t sell them. We couldn’t sell them the first time around.

I talk to people in other places, and I think what’s happening is the big boys, the companies in New York and Chicago like Steppenwolf, they’re doing fine. They’ve lost a lot of money off investments, but they have big time supporters. The little, little babies who don’t pay their actors and storefront things, they’re fine. It’s all of us in the middle [that are hurting].

Ken May: And that’s true nationwide. It’s the middle that’s really getting hit.

FT: What has been the local situation regarding corporate giving?

Rhonda Hunsinger: What I’m getting from the corporate giving people are a lot of tentative messages. Things like, “We really want to support you this year, but we can’t promise anything … but we’re going to try.”

Ken May: What I’m hearing is that corporate gifts, where they used to be $10,000, are now $1,500. If they’re still giving at all, it’s going down.

Jim Thigpen: A theater like ours, for instance, where we pay our actors, there’s no way ticket sales can cover our expenses. So for us to get cut down from $10,000 to $1,500, to a small operation with six full-time employees — it may be four next year — our job right now is to keep our doors open and hold our quality as best we can and not become something we’re not. Our core, Trustus Theater, is not necessarily musicals. Now Town Theater, that’s more of their ballgame. I’m still blown away — for us to get into that?
We just landed Rent. We have a 132-seat house. We’re doing Rent next year but it’s costing us like $500-somthing per performance in a small, rinky-dink theater. You go up to Greenville, and the community theaters there charge more than we charge here for tickets. But for our theater, at $20 a ticket, $500 each performance, it gets real hairy.

Rhonda Hunsinger: Royalties also are an issue for us. We don’t look at them so hard because they’re fairly typical no matter what we do. In our case, this season one of the bigger concerts is May 2, our season finale, and we’re doing Mahler. Mahler is huge, tons of musicians on stage, and every musician on stage is four rehearsals and a concert, so there’s that cost. And we had that discussion when everything started taking place, do we take Mahler off the program and do something smaller there? But because of where we are and the fact that we’re being looked at so closely by the community right now we made the decision to keep it.

Ken May: And of course others have not. The Charleston Symphony has drastically reduced their season and negotiated a pay cut with their players.

Rhonda Hunsinger: And unfortunately for them, they have a full-time core [of musicians], so there’s no flexibility there. Granted, we’re trying to treat ours like a full-time core and we’re still planning for next season like this season. We’re really gambling that we’re going to get the support to pull it off. We’re confident in ticket sales, but it’s a tough decision.

Wim Roefs: Our situation [at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art] is a little different in the sense that we don’t have anything to compare ourselves to since we’re in our first year.

But when a bunch of us started this project in 2007 it was a much better climate. We couldn’t even think about what it would be like when we opened in 2008 — in the meantime it’s just all bottomed out. So when we were starting, we were really waiting for a few big — well, big for us — chunks of money. Our budget the first year is $187,000, so we were waiting for these few big ones and then making a big leap of faith.

We did get, in 2007, money from [accommodations] tax and got money from [hospitality] tax, and then the decisive moment came when BlueCross came in and said we’re going to give you the rent for the gallery space. That gave us the money to say, all right, let’s make the jump. Then you have to start raising funds, both corporate and private. We don’t have ticket sales since we’re free. We’ve actually had good attendance. We’ve had 2,300 people come in through the first five months, which is pretty good for a contemporary arts center.

We’ve had some other very unfortunate things that are related to the economic situation as well, one of which is that we cannot apply to the arts commission for operational funds because we didn’t exist — the arts commission came up with the decision that there would be no new projects funded — so we’re screwed there, because we’re new. The first year we couldn’t get any money from them because we hadn’t existed for a year yet, then by the time we qualified for money, the ruling came down for no new organizations.

And even though now there’s going to be some NEA stimulus money, we can’t get that money because they can only hand it out to previous grantees and what have you. We’re pissing beside a pot on all of this stuff, and it’s a bit of an issue. The city already has sent out a letter to everyone that next year you can expect a 25-percent decrease in H-tax revenue, so the $35,000 that we got last year, if we get $25,000 to $27,000 this year we’ll be lucky. So in the meantime we’re trying to make people feel bad about not giving. It’s all about guilt.

After we took the plunge, we had a bunch of people lined up, corporations and also private donors, that we were fairly certain would come through. Most of them tell you, “We’re looking at your sponsorship package,” and then, “We’re still looking at it,” and then you don’t hear anything anymore. And these are people we know who love this project, love the arts and love the people involved. So what happens is they just don’t show up; we don’t see them. They’re hesitant to even show their face lest they would be looked at with dollar signs in our eyes.

We’ve had some really nice surprises [with] people showing up and giving us money that were not even on our radar, and thank god for that. The ones that we thought of, not as the usual suspects, but somewhat low-hanging fruit, is hanging pretty high so far.

FT: Morihiko, can you talk a little about coming in and in addition to programming responsibilities, rehearsals and performances, having to hit the road aggressively fundraising?

Morihiko Nakahara: Obviously it’s been challenging to come in right away and help fundraise in this climate. My primary role is that of raising awareness, raising friends who will hopefully turn into funds and support in that way. We could say we’re laying the groundwork, but at some point you want that to start bearing fruit, too. That part, making connections and getting our name out there, has been successful.

It is a different world now, too, for conductors and musical directors. When orchestras are searching for music directors now they won’t even look at people without music director experience somewhere because you’re a known quantity in terms of public speaking, education, marketing and fundraising. That’s probably for the better for the health of orchestras in this country for that person to be more than just a conductor.

FT: The arts community in Columbia took a huge hit when The State newspaper laid off the majority of its features team, including their longtime arts writer, signaling a very clear end to serious arts coverage from the state’s largest daily. How do you all foresee that impacting your ability to promote yourselves?

Morihiko Nakahara: As performers, in terms of critics, we hate them sometimes, honestly — just between you, the microphone and your readers. But really a bad review is better than no review at all because at least there’s some kind of dialogue. The gripe performers have is that [reviewers] don’t really know what’s going on — that’s what we like to think at least.

Ken May: Unless it’s a good review, of course.

Morihiko Nakahara: Right, then they’re brilliant and it’s the best thing ever. It’s an important part of the process, and what’s unfortunate is that the art of critical writing about specialized topics in the arts are just dying, and that’s a terrible thing for us. As far as advance notices go and preview features, those are critical any way you slice it.

Wim Roefs: That’s almost more critical than the reviews. If I could choose between decent play upfront and a review, even a good review, I’d always take the play up front, preferably with a big photograph.

Kay Thigpen: You know, we’re supposed to be attracting out-of-towners, right? And one of the first things I do when I go to a new town is get the newspaper and see what’s going on. Now, how can people know? If people are thinking of moving to Columbia or coming here for work, if The State newspaper is not giving that service, I don’t think they should be called The State newspaper.

Ken May: When I go to other cities, what I usually do is actually look at the free weeklies, because they typically have more listings and more information.

Wim Roefs: There’s no substitute for someone else bringing the news to thousands of people. If we had to send out that many press releases, we’d be bankrupt after the first round. There’s just no substitute, especially if you want to grow your audience. You don’t grow your audience with the people already on your mailing list.

Rhonda Hunsinger: When we found out about the features cuts, we had a discussion among staff that clearly, the readers who like to read about the arts are just going to stop going to The State because it’s just not there. If they stop looking at the section, there’s no reason for me to advertise in that section.

We said we’re going to shift a lot of our advertising dollars to the Free Times because we know at this point that people are going to the Free Times and more people are going to go to the Free Times. I wrote a letter to The State and told them I hope you realize that we’re going to have to rethink our marketing dollars, because if no one’s looking, I’m not advertising there. We’re a nonprofit and we have to be careful with our dollars.

FT: On the positive side, what’s working right now, what are some of the best practices to keep going?

Rhonda Hunsinger: Doing things one person at a time, making those personal connections and continuing to reach out to new people every day, every week.

Ken May: The New Audience Road Show has really been a success for the arts commission. It’s targeted at ages 23 to 40, a class is selected of about 25 participants and once you join, you’re introduced to a handful of community arts organizations and have in-depth, behind the scenes experience before the experience of the show or concert or opening. You’re obliged to bring friends, and you then become the docent for that experience, and it’s working really well.

The first class has now sort of taken over ownership of the program and are essentially its board and managers. Next year the alumni will take it over almost completely. We’re working with a group in Charleston to get one going there and we hope to be able to franchise it all over the state eventually.

Rhonda Hunsinger: It’s not just about getting people in the door; we can do that. It’s about getting people engaged.

Ken May: It’s understanding who they are, what they care about.

Jim Thigpen: That’s the reason we’ve lasted 25 years. For 25 years, when they walk in that door, Kay gives them a ticket. I’m out there giving people a welcome and working the audience. People know who Trustus is and what it is and they feel a part of it, feel welcomed.

Ken May: They know who the “us” is in Trustus.

FT: Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?

Kay Thigpen: I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, but I see a lot of hope. Our doors are still open. And we’re operating. We just don’t know. There were many years in the early years when we didn’t even know what the next show was going to be, so it’s something that I’m familiar with and in many ways Trustus has operated on hope and a prayer, and I’m still going to operate on hope and a prayer.

We have people coming in to pay for their tickets and handing us an extra five bucks and saying, “Please take this, it’s not much, but we need you here.” That’s unlike anything that we’ve ever had happen before.

Wim Roefs: As they say, buy what you love, because if you don’t it might go away. 

Let us know what you think. Email editor@free-times.com or rona@free-times.com.