Page 16 - APAP Inside Arts - Spring 2020

Renae Williams-Niles and Ben Folds
Musician, author and political activist Ben Folds is famous for improvising new songs on the spot. “It teaches me every single time I'm on tour,” he said of this practice, which the pop singer and multidisciplinary artist has been evolving in appearances with symphony orchestras around the nation. “Any musician can make up a song on the spot. The reason they don't do it is they are afraid to fail. That's where the risk comes in. So having the permission every night to have the space to fail, that's what we all need.”
thinning the higher they go. “The skinny branches,” Forbes said, “are the pinnacle. The height. The stretch. It is here where true creative freedom exists. Here where we feel the most unsteady. They can break ... but it is here where we must live.”
“Where do we as institutions mirror that behavior to take risks?” Forbes challenged
the audience in concluding
her comments. “Where are
we standing on the skinny branches?” She called on the field’s “responsibility to be daring, to be bold – rather than risk managers.”
“We are all risk-takers: people who give their all to make the arts possible,” said Mario Garcia Durham, the nine-year president and CEO of APAP, at that
same opening plenary session. Durham, who announced that he will be leaving the organization later this spring [see related story on page 20], is preparing to embrace his own risks. “It’s a tough time: socially, politically, economically,” he said, “but we are so resilient.”
Change, with its inherent risks, had other thematic expressions at the conference. New Orleans-based artist Nick Slie spoke about the intersection of resilience and climate change. He pointed out that NOLA is particularly hard hit by climate change not only in the reality
of intense storms such as Katrina, but because its land is disappearing to the warming
and rising waters faster than almost in any other place. “It was during that moment [Katrina] that we felt most alive,” Slie said. “They keep telling us that we are resilient. How do we turn this resilience into resistance?”
Folds was featured in conversation with APAP board member Renae Williams-Niles during the closing plenary session at APAP|NYC 2020, which had the theme of “Risk and Resilience” and took place January 10-14.
Days earlier, at the opening plenary, Kamilah Forbes, the executive producer at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, pointed out that the concept of risk “definitely involves ‘exposure to danger’”
and that is how we typically understand it in the arts field. The invention of the corporate uses of the term – risk aversion, risk factor and risk management – date from the 1940s to the 1960s and have crept into the nonprofit and arts sectors as well.
Forbes then spun a vivid allegory that continued to reverberate throughout the days that followed. She described life as a tree: a thick trunk grounded in deep roots, with branches
14 INSIDE ARTS SPRING 2020