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GRANTING WISHES BY SHERRY STERN
As theaters, dance troupes, musicians and storytellers find their post-pandemic path, Los Angeles County delivers recovery support $30,000 at a time.
FULFILLING THE VISION of a collective in Santa Monica, Asian Jews create an evening of storytelling, a rare opportunity for their mixed-heritage community to share personal experiences with audiences.
Across the county, a dance project begins to take shape for a performance inside and outside the historic HeraldExaminer building, a site-specific project exploring the tensions downtown.
And a company of deaf creators plans to workshop a play in Beverly Hills that dramatizes the true story of a deaf Jewish woman who lived as an outcast in Nazi Germany.
The early months of 2024 will be humming with these new works in various stages of development from The Braid in Santa Monica and Heidi Duckler Dance and Deaf West Theatre in Los Angeles.
As disparate as they are, each shares a benefactor: Los Angeles County, a key supporter in the post-pandemic recovery of the region’s performing arts.
Though public support for the arts may be declining just about everywhere, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture pumps about $4.5 million annually into the creative world to support the local arts ecosystem and to engage audiences.
The county has determined that the performing-arts community is especially burdened now, lagging significantly from pre-pandemic levels, even as other sectors of the creative economy recover.
A $1.2 million gift aims squarely at the performing arts’ road to recovery.
The county has a passionate champion guiding its grant giving in Kristin Sakoda, director of the L.A. County Department of Arts and Culture.
"We were able to successfully make the case for why public sector funding should go to the arts as part of our pandemic recovery," Sakoda says, "but also for the arts sector, for our communities, for all of the benefits of arts and culture, for quality of life."
The demand is huge.
Five hundred groups, producers and individuals applied for a share of the one-time L.A. County Performing Arts Recovery Grant. Eventually, 40 were awarded $30,000 each, mostly theater groups but also dance companies, music presenters and individual artists.
The grants are a bright light for small nonprofit arts organizations such as The Braid, which presents stories grounded in Jewish culture and experience.
“The signal it sends from the county is that arts are valuable, that arts are important, that Los Angeles is going to be a cultural center and we’re investing in bringing theater,” says David Chiu, a writer and The Braid’s marketing and communications manager.
“It’s a powerful message. It cannot be underestimated what it means for us and for [the city’’s] cultural landscape.”
The Braid will use its $30,000 for the development of What Do I Do With All This Heritage?, which gives face to Asian Jews, a little-discussed community of people such as Chiu, who is Jewish and Chinese and a contributor to the project.
“Being Chinese doesn’t make me less Jewish, and being Jewish doesn’t make me less Chinese,” Chiu says. “By being part of our show, it makes me love both those heritages even more and embrace them even more tightly.”
The Braid aims to present What Do I Do With All This Heritage? in locations across the county in May, timed for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month as well as Jewish American Heritage Month.
The grant is the difference-maker.
“I don’t think any of us would be here doing the work that we’re doing without that kind of support,” says the Braid artistic director Ronda Spinak.
For 32 years, Deaf West Theatre has earned acclaim for inventive stagings that blend sign language and spoken English. Two of its musicals, Big River and Spring Awakening, successfully transferred to Broadway, where they went on to receive Tony nominations.
Deaf West is in the early stages of developing a stage version of the 2009 short documentary Ingelore, about Ingelore Herz Honigstein. Born deaf and Jewish in 1924, Honigstein lived a harrowing life during the Holocaust before she eventually escaped to the United States.
The play is written and directed by her son, documentarian Frank Stiefel, and will star Linda Bove, a deaf actress who appeared in a recurring role for many years on Sesame Street
The county’s grant is helping to make the play happen: “$30,000 is a very significant amount for us!” writes Deaf West artistic director David Kurs via email. “It allows us to dedicate our funding to new work, where the funding is most needed.”
Ingelore will be workshopped at the Wallis Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, where Deaf West saw great success with its Spring Awakening revival. The new play could be mounted in late 2024 or early 2025.
Even an established company with three decades of success is still finding its footing after COVID-19.
“We faced significant challenges due to the pandemic: the suspension of our in-person programming, additional costs associated with implementing safety measures, and so forth,” Kurs writes. “Our priority was to create an environment where all participants and audience members could feel safe and comfortable.”
Another company with deep roots in the L.A. arts world is Heidi Duckler Dance, which has been creating site-specific works for non-traditional spaces since 1985.
Most of its performances are free to the public; grants and donations are critical for a company that doesn’t count on ticket income.
“The county is wonderful,” Duckler says. “It supports us in many different ways.” County funds help to underwrite her company’s festivals, salons and interns.
The recovery grant will help cover costs for Herald In and Examine Throughout, taking place next spring at the distinctive Herald-Examiner building, designed by architect Julia Morgan and constructed in 1914 for William Randolph Hearst.
It might seem cheaper for a company to use another building rather than to have its own space but, according to Duckler, that’s not necessarily the case.
“Everything is expensive in all of our of productions,” she says. “When you’re using a space that isn’t intended to be a theater, you need to think about all the lighting and sound and all the things that you want to bring to the space so that the audience can have a theatrical experience.”
As a site-specific company, on the other hand, the company was more flexible than most during the shutdown, Duckler says, and was able to pivot to video when in-person performances weren’t possible.
When the county put out the call for grant applicants, it had hoped to fund specific projects. The timing was ideal for Duckler’s team.“We were in the throes of trying to find money to do our project at the HeraldExaminer,” she says.
Grants are made by the county’s arts and culture department, overseen by Sakoda since its launch in 2019. Its funding support extends beyond performing arts to museums and cultural centers.
But for Sakoda, performance is especially meaningful: She studied ballet as a child and once performed professionally. “It’s a part of the field that’s near and dear to my heart,” she says.
But it’s more than personal. Her department’s mission, she says, is big and broad: to support creativity but also the well-being of its diverse communities, so that everybody might have access to the arts.
That’s more necessary post-pandemic, she says, noting the ongoing national concern about social isolation.
“Bringing people together around music or shared experience really is a powerful way to address that.”
