by SIMA BELMAR IN PRACTICE: Going Health Nuts
ARTS LEADERSHIP AND A HEALTHY ARTS COMMUNITY
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by KEN FOSTER, Director, Arts Leadership at University of Southern California
Feldenkrais with Mary Armentrout; dance classes with Randee Paufve, Nina Haft, Mo Miner, Melecio Estrella, and Joan Lazarus; Iyengar Yoga with Anneke Faas; lymphatic massage and somatic experiencing with Ama Dawn Greenrose; acupuncture with Carla Cassler; Jungian psychotherapy with (not telling! I’ll share body workers but not my shrink); nutritional advice from newly minted nutritionist Vika Teicher; no screens past 8pm, lights out at 10pm (this is more aspirational than actual); consumption of half my body weight in water every day (also aspirational—I hate having to pee all the time); mindfulness meditation (I don’t always manage even five minutes a day, but I believe “meditation on the spot” as Pema Chödrön calls it, counts); listening to Tara Brach pod- casts; clean eating (I started a 30-day clean eating challenge, the 30-Clean, in late Sep- tember, and haven’t gone back to any of my old habits…yet; I could write a whole piece on the stress of trying to figure out how to eat—what’s an omnivore to do? Right, ask Michael Pollan). I’ve got calls out to a Reiki I need all those body-centric activities to give my guts and fascia an opportunity to tell me what to do. practitioner and a Jin Shin Jyutsu master. I dabble in Qi Gong (I love your DVD, Margit Galanter!). I get occasional chiro/ART tune- ups from Bruce Rizzo and Rob Pape, plus PT with Wendy Clark at Kaiser Oakland. And of course, as much time as possible with beloved friends and family, indulging in intel- lectual inquiry, creative practice, commisera- tion, and The Great British Baking Show. How do I afford all this? I do a lot of bar- tering, for one thing. And it’s not like these things are weekly or even monthly in some cases. I mainly try to make room for at least one of the above body-mind modalities per day. Also, though precarious, I’m privileged to have three jobs that allow for a flexible schedule to accommodate these psychophysi- cal adventures. Folks give Descartes a really hard time for initiating the mind-body split, but I think we’re too hard on the guy. I certainly know that my mind and my body are deeply con- nected but I also often feel like they are two separate entities vying for my attention. I was not raised to listen to my body, so my mind does a lot of the heavy lifting for me,
IN OUR USUAL pre-article email exchange, In Dance editor, Wayne Hazzard wrote to me, “What is healthy these days?” I have a very personal stake in this ques- tion, which made it hard to sit down and write about it. I tried to write about it when I was feeling well—but when I’m feeling well, I don’t want to think about my health. I tried to write about it when I was in the throes of a panic attack because I was convinced I had neck cancer (more on that below)—but it’s challenging to write when you’re lying on the cool tile of your bathroom floor with your legs up the wall, sobbing on the phone to your psychotherapist. I tried to write about it when the air quality in the Bay Area was worse than Delhi and Beijing—but my kids were home because schools were closed and Yahtzee took precedent over writing. I tried to write about it the Monday after Thanks- giving because my deadline was in three days—that worked! I was diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2016, found out I had the BRCA1 mutation a month or so later, had a double mastectomy in July, and a full hysterectomy plus breast reconstruction in December. Then, in early 2018, I discovered the doc- tors missed a spot in a single lymph node, so I had surgery again, then four rounds of chemotherapy, and five weeks of radiation. I finished all the treatment in July, spent Sep- tember in a panic that I would be diagnosed with cancer every two years for the rest of my life (hence the aforementioned neck can- cer panic—it took three doctors to convince me that I have, in their words, “a perfectly normal neck!”), and enjoyed the extra hour afforded by Daylight Savings Time wallow- ing in the realization that I have anger issues and can’t forgive myself for yelling at my kids all the time. Hard times, my friends, hard times. Add to my personal saga our national politics and global climate change and it would seem per- fectly rational to start smoking a daily pack of Winstons again and having liquid lunches (Seabreezes, to be precise) like I did during the summer of 1988 in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. (That was my weight loss plan at the time. Worked like a charm.) But I want to stick around for as long as I can for those kids I yell at all the time so they can com- plain about me in therapy and then tell me about what a shitty parent I was at Passover seders. So what does health look like “in prac- tice” for me now? And what does my reflec- tion on that question have to offer our phe- nomenal dance community? The hardest part is feeling like I don’t have any control over my health because there are too many variables at play. I know I have some control, and most of it has to do with what I do with my body—how and how often I move it, what I feed it, how much I allow my mind to fuck with it. To cultivate the best body-mind relationship I can, I engage in a rather extensive and some- what unwieldy self-care regimen, which includes:
often to ill effect. So I need all those body- centric activities to give my guts and fascia an opportunity to tell me what to do. If I’ve learned anything about health, it’s that trusting in one’s health is fundamental to feeling healthy, and that enjoying one- self as much as possible is good for your organs. I remember yogi Rodney Yee telling a smoker who was feeling bad about smok- ing that if he’s going to smoke he might as well do so with pleasure: deep inhale, long slow exhale—the yoga of nicotine addiction. It’s also a great idea to see beauty and humor wherever you can. Sounds Pollyanna-ish, but for a gal who grew up with whatever the opposite of Pollyanna is (Yenta?), it works wonders. For example, having gummy bears that are anchored under my pectoral muscles in place of breasts that used to hang so low it took an acrobatic feat of drop-and-scoop to get them into a bra, means doing grand allegro braless—plus, I can now wear plung- ing necklines and backless dresses. Having no reproductive organs means no menstrual cycle and thus no fear of pregnancy (I know, I was pretty much out of the woods before my hysterectomy, but not totally out!). Other perks: my hair has grown back curly post- chemo and I have an asymmetrical tan across the right side of my chest that makes me look like I sunbathed half topless. My health woes have taught me a lot about gratitude, though it’s still hard to feel it sometimes. (Thus the gratitude account- ability email exchange I have with a friend.) They’ve showed me who’s in my corner. Above all, they’ve made me painfully, joy- fully conscious of the fact that we’re all born into a death sentence. And what better way to partner with death than to dance. SIMA BELMAR, PH.D. , is a Lecturer in the Depart- ment of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly articles and book reviews have appeared in TDR , the Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices , Performance Matters , Contemporary Theatre Review , and The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies . enjoying oneself as much as possible is good for your organs. If I’ve learned anything about health, it’s that trusting in one’s health is fundamental to feeling healthy, and that
have been ridiculed as soft, non-competitive, unrealistic and similar adjectives that are used to denigrate what are actually policies and practices that are humane and respectful of our individual and collective selves. As we move into a new world with alter- ative ideas of what a healthy organization is comprised of and what constitutes healthy leadership, those individuals and organiza- tions that are riding these trends rather than fighting them are the ones that will emerge from the chaos of our transitional moment into a new, healthier environment. So what should those who aspire to be healthy leaders and organizations be doing? First, study environmentalism and resil- ience theory and re-envision your idea of what makes a sustainable (i.e. healthy) arts organization. There is an environmental concept that I love that defines sustainabil- ity as the endless striving for an unattainable ideal. Is there a better way to define art and therefore arts organizations? As artists, are we ever “finished” with the process of cre- ation of a work of art? Healthy arts organi- zations must think in the same way; that our work is an endless process of striving for an unachievable ideal. It is the ideal that drives us to work; sustainability comes in the act of the work itself. It’s not about how big your organization’s budget is, or how many staff you have, or how stable (or maybe rigid?) you are! It’s about that vision—and the end- less striving towards it—that makes you sus- tainable and healthy. Are you really working towards that ideal or are you just trying to grow your budget? A new, resilient organizational vision also requires a new vision of leadership. Healthy organizations will look at the diversity of their staff and leadership for clues to new ways of providing organizational leader- ship. Do we really need a CEO “at the top,” a concept and a term that we have appro- priated from the hierarchical, straight white male dominated business model of corpo- rate America? This is an organizational form and structure that is, in fact, antithetical to who we are as artists and what we do as arts organizations. It stifles the creativity, experimentation and exploration that are, or should be, at the heart of our organization. Can we imagine new ways of working that has us thinking – and acting – more like the artists we are than the business people we most assuredly are not? Now that we have (finally) made some progress towards bringing diverse voices into our organization, we need to bring those diverse leadership perspectives into our orga- nization as well. Today’s arts leaders need to
First, thanks largely to the internet and all its technological progeny, we are now living in a horizontal, networked world, not the vertical, hierarchical world that we Boom- ers inherited, sustained and still try to sus- tain even as we see it no longer operative. “Information wants to be free” may be old (and debatable) news but it is a signifier of the wholesale disruption of hierarchical pat- We are now in this interesting phenomenon in which organizations are looking for leaders who fit a leadership profile that terns of control that once were signifiers of a “strong” or “healthy” organization. Social media and its ilk mean that everyone has access to everyone and everything all the time. Information chaos reigns in the con- temporary world and no carefully designed, centralized, “chain of command” system can contain that chaos. We see evidence of that everywhere we turn from politics, to media, to education, to health care. All of our pre- viously stable, solid, societal institutions are being upended and remade. Why would we think the arts would escape this fate? Second, as the population continues to diversify and the values and beliefs of the multiple cultures that comprise the coun- try proliferate throughout all of our societal structures, organizational systems that have been created, controlled and dominated by straight white men and the people who try to act like them, become increasingly sus- ceptible to disruption and transformation. When the dominant culture (which actually thought/thinks of itself as the “only” cul- ture), is confronted with the reality of its loss of power that comes from being the domi- nant culture, organizational change has to occur. Command and control can no longer command or control the organization. Happily, ideas like leadership are not the province of a single culture and a healthy organization recognizes that and embraces multiple leadership strategies to insure orga- nizational health. We are now in a world of shared leadership, consensus decision-mak- ing, horizontal organizational structures, team building, work-life balance and self- care to name only a few more effective, and healthier, approaches to organizational lead- ership. These are concepts that heretofore fewer people fulfill, and even fewer want to fulfill.
I THINK IT WAS SOMETIME back in the 90’s when the arts field first started talking about a crisis of future leadership. We looked around and saw a LOT of Baby Boomer organization leaders nearing or entering retirement. “Where is the next generation of leaders coming from?” became a big worry and a topic of many conversations. Leader- ship development programs of all types were created to address this concern, including a proliferation of graduate arts management programs that would help train “the next generation of arts leaders,” ready to take over once the Boomers got out of the way. It wasn’t long however, before some wrin- kles in this imagined scenario emerged. The first was that a LOT of Baby Boom- ers refused to retire. There were many rea- sons for this. To begin with, the arts leaders of the Baby Boom generation were deeply involved in creating the enormous nonprofit arts infrastructure that we have today. We prided ourselves (I say “we” because I am of this generation) on our devotion to our work above all else. Having invested our hearts and souls in our work with a pas- sion of a generation determined to change the world, we were understandably reluctant to leave. Additionally, with our identities so completely intertwined with our work as an “Arts Leader,” many of us balked at the idea of walking away from something to which we had devoted our entire adult lives. With- out these jobs in these organizations that we had worked so hard to create and inhabit, what meaning was there in our lives? Furthermore, over the years that we had selflessly worked for arts organizations we had discounted our own health and well- being and sacrificed our future “for the good of the organization.” Many of us went with- out health insurance; most failed to invest in retirement. Now, approaching age 65 and beyond, the decision to keep working “until I die in the chair” was as much about money as it was about meaning. So we stayed; and continue to stay. In some large organizations, with more stable and secure finances, arts leaders actu- ally did invest in their future, so they could, and did, retire. But then, as search firms and search committees looked around for their replacements, another trend emerged. Not only were younger people lacking the “deep experience” that every job posting asks for in executive roles, it became clear that many younger people actually didn’t want those jobs! Watching their “elders” in these all con- suming, eighty hour a week jobs devoted to a LOT of “administrivia,” many of the next generation were thinking, “Why would I want that job? It’s enormously stressful and unhealthy!”Who can blame them? We are now in this interesting phenomenon in which organizations are looking for leaders who fit a leadership profile that fewer people fulfill, and even fewer want to fulfill. This is not quite the leadership crisis we expected. But is it really a crisis? Or is it a chance to remake our field and the very concept of leadership in a healthier way? To answer that, we need to step back and take a more expan- sive view of the world we live in and how we might need to rethink our idea of what makes a healthy organization and what a healthy leadership approach actually might be. As the contours of our world are chang- ing, and as organizations become more multi-faceted and diverse in their compo- sition and staffing, ideas of what makes a healthy organization are evolving. I want to focus here on two major external trends that are, in my view, transforming our under- standing of healthy leadership and functional organizations.
be open to alternative points of view, able to encourage intense and productive discussions and not threatened by dissent and disrup- tion. The best arts leaders in today’s world must above all be synthesizers; people who can listen to and manage alternative, even conflicting points of view and synthesize them into a coherent organizational ethos. Getting everyone “on the same page” does not mean lock-step agreement to a single narrative but instead a somewhat loosely defined, adaptable idea based on where we are headed and able to acknowledge that multiple paths will get us there. Our willing- ness to tolerate an atmosphere of continu- ous change and adaptability to that change is what will make us both successful and healthy organizations. In today’s chaotic environment we have a very human desire, perhaps need, for “stabil- ity” for “rock solid” answers. We desperately seek a predictable future. This is not possible. It’s not the world we live in and there are no signs that events around us are going to get any less unpredictable than they are. So arts leaders interested in creating healthy arts organizations will have to strive for a more dynamic view of what stability means, one that is focused on the vision but willing to entertain multiple strategies to get us there. We just can’t be the “institution builders” that defined the Baby Boomer generation of leadership. Instead, we need to be facilitators and guides, helping steer our organizations through some very rocky waters. Our choice now is to either adapt our organizations and our leadership to this changed world, or engage in the endlessly frustrating, unsatisfying and ultimately unhealthy way of working of the past. Where are you headed? Kenneth Foster is Professor of Practice in the Thorn- ton School of Music and Director of the Graduate Arts Leadership program at the University of South- ern California. From 2003 to 2013, he was Executive Director of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. His first book, Performing Arts Presenting: From Theory to Practice , was published in 2006. His second book, Arts Leadership; Creating Sustainable Arts Organi- zations , was published by Routledge Press in May 2018. He has an extensive national and international consulting practice for a variety of arts organizations, specializing in leadership development and innova- tive organizational design and planning for the 21st century. He currently resides in Pasadena with his partner Nayan Shah. kenfosterarts@gmail.com
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CONTENTS
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NOMINATIONS OPEN: 2019 Dancers Choice Award
ON THIS PAGE / In Practice: Going Health Nuts by Sima Belmar 3 / A Healthy Arts Community by Ken Foster 4 / Speak: A Decade of FRESH Festival and 20 Years of ALTERNATIVA by Kathleen Hermesdorf 8 / January/February Performance Calendar 11 / ODC’s Healthy Dancers’ Clinic by Juliet Paramor 12 / Dance and Disability in 2018 by Patricia Reedy 15 / Isadora Duncan Dance Awards Nominees & Honorees
Bay Area Dance Week and Dancers’ Group are now accepting nominations for the 12th annual Dancers Choice Award. Honor an individual or organization who has impacted the dance community—behind the scenes, in the classroom, or on the stage. Nominations open through January 9, 2019 bayareadance.org/awards_dancers
Located in the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area, Mills College offers BA, MA, and MFA degrees in dance. Expand every dimension of your art through: • Choreography • Theory • Pedagogy • Technology • Performance GRADUATE FACULTY Kara Davis Ann Murphy Sonya Delwaide Sheldon Smith Molissa Fenley Victor Talmadge thinking bodies moving minds
Carla Service, 2018 awardee / photo by Ah Sou Saechao
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