Page 17 - APAP Inside Arts - Spring 2020

“You can't know risk and resilience without joy and vice versa,” said performance artist Ty Defoe in conversation with arts administrator Aubrey Bergauer
at Sunday’s long conversation plenary session. “I think joy, as
an indigenous queer person, is what gets me up in the morning,” said Defoe. “To someone who is a survivor, who was handed down 500 years of genocide, joy is my hope to wake up to in the morning.” Resilience is finding this joy amid more failures than successes.
Triumphant tales marked
the conference as well: Emily Prince’s award-winning 5 Minutes to Shine Awards Luncheon presentation on the thriving Stuart’s Opera House in the poorest county in Ohio and
each APAP Leadership Fellows Program member’s vignettes, including the Tennessee Arts Commission’s achievement in mapping its rural arts assets at the Saturday plenary session.
The principles of community engagement and art-making were combined in Free the Festival:
A Blueprint for Community Building and Inclusion. Presenters Kyle Homstead and Cassandra Holden described their work in Easthampton, Massachusetts,
a mill town where tensions across age and cultural groups led to a multiyear investment in infrastructure and community through a bridge-building event called Millpond.live.
“We measured our success not by the numbers, but by who came,” explained Homstead – and to get those people to come, the festival organizers had to anticipate
every possible problem and think holistically and with a policy of radical inclusivity.
APAP Artist Institute
“THIS YEAR, WE WOULD LIKE TO ASK YOU ALL TO THINK OF APAP AS A NEIGHBORHOOD AND ALL OF THE PARTICIPANTS AS YOUR NEIGHBORS”
— SHANTA THAKE
The solutions came in droves: better lighting at a park, a
beer section that included families, outreach to overlooked audiences, free parking, food from a local co-op.
“There’s a kind of magic when you have little kids, their grand- parents, and teenagers who are
finding a place for themselves at this festival,” explained Holden. Another topic that addressed
risk and resilience permeated
the conference: race, equity, diversity and inclusion, or REDI. In a statement on REDI, APAP took a declarative stance: “We commit to the work of REDI with openness and deep institutional commitment, realizing that REDI is a sustained practice that rejects tokenism and instead embeds equity across the performing
arts field.”
APAP committed to making
REDI a top priority woven
into all APAP work moving forward. How was this expressed at the conference?
In a word: everywhere. This year’s conference included a whopping 26 sessions that
were explicitly REDI-focused. Through the various workshops, forums, panels and affinity groups, intersections between the performing arts world and REDI were richly and deeply represented.
SPRING 2020 INSIDE ARTS 15