Ain Gordon, 2018-19 Visiting Artist

Award-winning writer, director, and actor Ain Gordon returned to The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage for a seven-month term as a Visiting Artist. As the inaugural Visiting Artist in 2011, Gordon engaged in a residency designed as a creative exchange between a working artist and the Center’s staff, constituents, and communities—work he continued in 2018-19 in response to the evolving practices of Philadelphia’s cultural practitioners and the Center’s grantmaking work.

“Ain is a talented interlocutor,” notes the Center’s executive director, Paula Marincola. “He has a distinctive ability to think across disciplines and ask challenging questions that open up new possibilities for what can happen within artistic practice. We’re excited to have him back as a thinking partner for Center constituents and staff.”

In serving as a conduit between the Center and its grantees, Gordon’s past work includes the creation of the White Box Residencies, a program that invited outside artists to creatively explore the physical space of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and to interact with its staff, and An Experiment in Five Acts, a program designed for artists and cultural producers negotiating mid-career challenges. Gordon also contributed to Push Me, Pull You, a series addressing issues of co-authorship and collaboration. Read more about his previous tenure as Visiting Artist here.

Upon his return, we asked Gordon to reflect on developments in the field at large and here in Philadelphia.

How do you think the conditions of artistic practice have evolved field-wide since your experience of being the Center’s first visiting artist in 2011?

I wonder if, over time, how I’ve answered this question has changed more than the exterior conditions themselves? I think at a younger stage in my life/work I might have confidently asserted that conditions had recently…

a) gotten more expansive

b) or less so

c) or that presenters were more open to work that didn’t fit the 8PM /curtain-up model

d) or presenters facing dwindling funding increasingly were forced to turn back to ticket sales via the traditional 8PM/curtain-up model

e) or venues were growing interested in planting deeper roots into their physical community

f) or venues were increasingly recognizing the different programmatic interests of their traditional ticket buyers and their physical community

g) or grantmakers seemed to be more focused on institutions via large-scale production grants

h) or grantmakers now seemed more focused on individuals via big-pay-out artist awards

i) or grantmakers were more fiscally conservative in funneling support to specific productions instead of to unrestricted general operating funds

j) or grantmakers were more fiscally realistic in recognizing that the primary output of performing artists are productions rather than institutional maintenance requiring general operating support

Now, I’m less willing to assert because I experience it all as a pendulum—not a two-direction pendulum—maybe a five-direction pendulum that swings due to a spectrum of logics and personalities and national conditions and tastes—many of which I’ve navigated (it feels like at least) twice. “Maturity” enables me to be sanguine (ah, that particular thinking has regained currency). But, candidly, some pendulum swings are more conducive to me/my work (and, even more candidly); more tolerant of my current “mature” career stage (irrelevant if you asked me 25 years ago.) That is what I mean about how a personal response to this question may change more than the conditions that prompt the question itself: as one recognizes the life cycles of a life in art plus one’s own shelf-life after 25 years of intermittent “successful” visibility.

Did your past experiences with the Center have an impact on your own creative work in some way?

Well of course the pat answer is that I don’t come away from any in-depth experience without it affecting my work—true but too general. My theater work is primarily inspired by overlooked history; in particular, this research often causes me to emotionally parachute into a place/space/moment previously unknown to me—to try and internalize via real-time experience the feel of a temporal or geographic area. I didn’t realize it till nearly the end of my last tenure at the Center but the 18th floor [offices of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage] became the physical parentheses into which I parachuted. No, I did not make a piece of theater in response, but I inhabited the process in much the same way—and was creatively “turned on” by being asked (permitted) to use my creative tools to a different end.

At the Center I had more than one audience (staff and grantees, which of course are multiple audiences in of themselves), more than one stage (offices, meetings rooms, Xerox room, kitchen, website), and a constantly reforming cast (everyone who walked through the door or virtual portal) all geared to multiple products (sometimes documenting process as product but never making theater). Everything I wrestle with in the rehearsal room was summoned: legibility, compromise, authority, longevity, ramification, by-product, immediacy, mediation, failure, reinvention, intention, reception, attraction, and viability, etc. Absolutely, looking at what I managed and failed to do on the 18th floor in collaboration with a group of extremely dedicated and preternaturally “inclined” people caused me to reassess my tool kit when I returned to the rehearsal room and a group of people who were supposed to be dedicated (but were not always) while prepping to meet audiences who one hopes are inclined but are rarely as intensely so as folks on the 18th floor.

Since your first term as Visiting Artist, and your later collaborations with some of Philadelphia’s cultural organizations, you’ve gotten to know the city’s cultural community fairly well. How would you characterize our community, and what changes or shifts are you observing in your most recent visits here?

I’m not sure I can confidently characterize a cultural community when there are always so many distinct individual ecosystems within it. Trying to answer this (rather than sidestep it, which maybe I’m still doing), I imagined characterizing the NYC “cultural community” (in which I have labored my entire career) and thought, “no, that’s impossible” (Carnegie Hall to Lincoln Center to Bushwick Starr to drag performers at Lips?). I will say I have felt a particular equilibrium in Philadelphia: a baseline sense that the work will happen regardless of competition for the increasingly overburdened attention of the so-called powers that be (including audience)—without placing primary emphasis on that attention as a leading affirmation of the work—or as the most discussed roadblock. Yes, I have certainly encountered competition and ambition and nerves and even nuttiness (all good in the right measure) but not vibrating as hard with fight or flight.

BUT I am an interloper so I just may be naïvely picturing a landscape to envy. I do imagine (maybe erroneously) that (though costs in Philadelphia continue to rise precipitously) the relative affordability of the city makes it just that much more possible to work with just that much less fear—removing a tendency to trickle down that fear, displacing it to aspects of the work where it does not truly belong, which then boil back up to seriously impede.

BUT I think I might have said that of my own corner of the New York performance world when I was 25—which takes me back to how answering any of these questions might change most dramatically via internal alterations than external. (Maybe I am “25” again in Philadelphia because it’s a relatively new ecosystem to me—which, given my aforementioned “mature” career stage might be exactly the refresh my personal practice craves—hence my, possibly purposeful, naiveté).

BUT none of this really answers your question (sorry) but you have me thinking it…

And while I’m ranting I’d like to stand on a chair and say to your first question: Of course BOTH external and internal are changing, but right now I like grabbing full authority by asserting my sightline as the primary changer rather than having me as subject to a “changing field.” (It’s a little akin to my response to a question asked in some grant applications that goes something like this: “How will this grant change your practice going forward?” Sorry, I can’t afford to hand all that power to another when I am the only constant in my career.)

As your relationship with the Center has continued, has your thinking about the relationship between funder and artist changed at all?

My relationship with the Center was not my first relationship with a funder outside the traditional granter/grantee paradigm—but it was absolutely the most in-depth, the one in which I was given the most free reign (to put that in comparative context, I cannot quite imagine giving most actors that much creative rope). I don’t know that it “changed” my perception of the relationship between artist and funder. I am a character-driven story-teller so I always mentally/emotionally zoom into anyone with whom I am talking, trying to imagine their insides while listening to their speaking outside; in that way I have always experienced a “funder” as also a human with more back-story than the one available in a “grant meeting.”

What I did learn at the Center that I had not previously known was how many emotions permeated people on the 18th floor that mirrored those of most artists I know (though pooling in different amounts in different corners of the process). I had not seen before these specific fatigues and doubts and disillusions because I’d primarily witnessed grant officers when they prepared to be seen in their performance called a “meeting.” My rare backstage view added more empathetic oxygen to how I understood the more packaged view back in the public sphere (their performance). I wanted to disseminate that view to those who could not witness it, much as I want an audience to see the back-story of any character I put on stage.