Nor Art: Specialness is Unsustainable / Upcoming Performances / Come On Out for the Continued Socialist Takeover of Chicago 2023
Welcome
This is the first time I've sent out this newsletter, and it feels both cool and weird. Every choice I make I'm like, is this what people do? If so, should I immediately stop doing it, or should I forge forth?
Image: Forging forth, aka Nora in a DIY/thrifted astronaut costume (blue puffy jacket, white moon boots, bare legs cause we're not actually in space, knee brace on one leg, and astro helmet from a costume shop) crouched low on the floor with one leg extended as if about to rise back up, inside bim bom studios, which has mostly white walls and sound absorbers with wood floors, shelving, and stools/tables. Lighting is kinda golden. Still from footage shot by Anjal Chande, June 2022.
Updates
Upcoming Performances & Screenings
As I write about further below, two projects that are really important to me will show at Elevate Chicago Dance the weekend of October 13-16, 2022, at various venues in Chicago. Exact timing and venue confirmation is TBD, so this is more a put-it-on-your-radar than I-have-discount-codes-for-you-to-buy-tix. (I do have a link for that for the WNBA semifinals on Wednesday tho...)
One is a short work-in-progress excerpt of my current solo process. The excerpt itself is currently titled The F_____, the Fawn, and the Boss, and it's part of a larger solo I'm working on called The Dumpster Out Back. It'll be about 15 minutes long and I'll be performing it on Saturday night, October 15, at a venue TBD.
The other is a screening of Episode 2 of The Real Dance: A Micro Reality TV Show, the dance reality TV series I initiated last year. My partner Grace McCants and I co-created and co-directed Episode 2, which initially premiered at the Pivot Arts Festival in June. This episode features me and Grace making a dance together as people who are also long-term boos/life partners. Not gonna lie, folks seemed to resonate with it, so I am glad for it to get new eyes this fall. This work is about 17 minutes long and will likely show on Sunday morning, October 16, downtown at the Cultural Center.
I'd love it if you came to either or both. If you can't - and I know a lot of out-of-town folks have been asking how they can watch - secret's out, the episode Grace and I made is on my website along with Episode 1. (And the solo excerpt is just the beginning, #FCFFF - fingers crossed for future funding.) Current film version is open-captioned and we've got a version with audio description on its way (shoutout to our collaborator Victor Cole on that front).
Friends and Strangers
Here are a couple events in September I hope to catch all or parts of - maybe you wanna catch them too or talk about them after? Most in Chicago, one in NYC.
J e l l o at Elastic Arts, Friday 9/2
Dance in the Round events as part of Parijat Desai's residency at Soham Dance Space, multiple dates & locations throughout September
Chicago Performs w/ work by Erin Kilmurray, Bimbola Akinbola, & Derek Lee McPhatter at the MCA, Thursday & Friday 9/15 & 9/16
Honey Pot Performance's Ladies Ring Shout 2.0 Staged Reading Performances, First Church of the Brethren, Friday 9/16 - Sunday 9/18
Work by Matty Davis & Ben Gould, CPR NYC, Friday 9/30
I'm sure there are many more. Merde to all.
Come On Out for the Continued Socialist Takeover of Chicago 2023
Image: A screenshot of race results at one point during the vote count of the runoff city council election in April 2019, showing machine nepotism candidate Deb Mell with 3,520 votes and our girl Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez with 3,521. Rossana ultimately won with 13 votes and has done so much since despite being a rookie alder.
Yes, it's true, it's time, there's an election coming, and no I'm not even talking about the one in November that is national but our own special little odd-year (off-year?) one in Chicago next year for mayor and City Council. Primary is in February 2023 (seriously, wtf is up with that timing, no one knows, it's like they just enjoy making volunteers stand outside polling places at 6am in the freezing cold, or maybe they know that then we have to borrow the spare coats of our friends volunteering inside and that actually builds solidarity so maybe it's a win?! idk, anyway tangent over).
I'm very much a messenger and not an expert here - I follow the lead of abolitionist, socialist, and union leaders in Chicago (Defund CPD, United Working Families, DSA, CTU, and so on). But here's my pitch: Chicago has historically been a town of machine bullshit and neoliberal bullshit. The thing that slows that bullshit down is multiracial cross-class movement organizing for racial, economic, and broader social justice. And having City Council members who come from and are thus accountable to those movements can shift the nature of the power struggle and change what's possible in policy. I have seen this incremental but palpable in my own life ever since Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (#shouldabeenadolphin) was elected in the 35th ward in 2015. Right now we're at 12% of City Council being Socialist, which is a number I brag about to my friends on the coasts. I'm here for the bragging rights but also because: getting involved in hyper-local issue and electoral campaigns is one of the best ways to feel connected to your own values and the place you live at the same time. The local work feels a lot less like "we can vote our way out of fascism I promise!! Signed, Nancy Pelosi" and a lot more like building sustained power.
So , if Chicago is home for you, I encourage you to find a competitive candidate who's geographically proximal to you and aligned with your values, and go knock some doors or make some calls or get petition signatures. Or just show up to the ball games, that's cool too. You might consider the following:
Rossana Rodriguez for 33
Jeanette Taylor for 20
Angela Clay for 46
Nick Ward for 48
Oscar Sanchez for 10
Mueze Bawany for 50
Carlos Ramirez-Rosa for 35
Daniel La Spata for 1
There are definitely others, and I'm sure more will be announced
Last but not least, if you are interested in calling pro-choice Republicans and independents in swing states/districts and using deep canvassing skills to try to compel them to change their votes, that is a project I am working on in my day job, and I'm happy to share details about it.
And now for the semi-spiciness I pitched on social media to get myself some sweet sweet subscribers:
Becoming Special-Skeptical
3,000+ words on acceptance, rejection, and the tiresome specialness carousel
This summer I got a series of acceptances and rejections from various arts opportunities that created a feeling of what I’d call specialness whiplash, and that left me with a heightened sense of skepticism about the whole arts opportunity economy - the specialness economy. I’m trying out writing about it because I’ve decided it might be a good idea to practice articulating my thoughts beyond process-ranting at the handful of peer artists and loved ones who are down to listen. Some quick caveats are that none of the following is particularly new or news, nor is my experience particularly egregious, uncommon, unique, or unfair. I haven’t suffered or been wronged or denied anything; in fact I’ve actually been given some exciting opportunities! It’s just that along the way I got a little specialness whiplash, and it got me thinking.
It also kinda goes without saying, and yet I’d like to say/acknowledge, that I’m writing all this from the context of my work and my identities - as a white artist, as an artist with a day job in nonprofit social change organizing that pays most of my bills but that I sometimes wish I could quit in order to make art full time (even just for a little while!), as a multidisciplinary dance/performance/aspiring-but-also-actual-filmmaking queerdo artist who sometimes feels like people get me and see me and other times feels like they only do if I am the right amount of dancey or the right kind of queer. Any generalizations that land as mildly or wildly inaccurate are a result of my ignorance, which I’ll always be grateful to be called in on.
I often tell people in other industries that being an independent artist means constantly reapplying for your job. In order to have the time and resources to do your work, you have to prove your worthiness to someone else who has those resources and might give them to you - and then you do that over and over again, because opportunities are rarely long-term and most of the time you get rejected. This is a state of affairs - “Please sir, may I have some more dance money please?” - that I’ve come to accept as normal, as I assume many of us have. And yet something about this summer hit different. Hashtag maybe it’s the pandemic.
For a little context, as of this writing in late August 2022, I’ve applied for 19 arts opportunities this year - grants, residencies, performance platforms, and even “fancy growth” (as labeled in my spreadsheet tracker lol). I’ve been accepted to 3, and those I haven’t heard back from yet are for the most part intensely competitive, so it’s quite likely that count won’t change. Actually, “intensely competitive” is pretty much the norm: one that I got rejected from this week, the Franklin Furnace FUND (an NYC-based but nationwide-open performance production platform), accepted 13 out of 328 applications, or 3.9%, which calls to mind the Queer|Art Mentorship program, an unpaid opportunity in the “fancy growth” category which I’ve applied to before and which I more or less plan to get rejected from in a couple months, who let applicants know that this year they received 348 applications and will accept 10 artists, or roughly 3%. (If you’re wondering about Chicago-based opportunities, spoiler alert is that there aren’t that many of them, but one I’m still waiting to hear back from had 147 applications for 6-8 slots, or maximum 5.44% acceptance rate.)
These numbers are like, what, Harvard or some shit? The college I went to had a 37% acceptance rate the year I got accepted with a half-tuition scholarship (and my remaining loans literally just got canceled lol). Let’s just say I was not prepared for these numbers, even as someone who graduated in a recession and logged a $13,000 AGI on my tax returns for the first couple years after doing so.
But by now I’m certainly used to it - used to mostly getting rejected - as are so very many actors, musicians, writers, visual artists, dancers, and other kinds of artists and creators. So what I was struck by this summer was not actually the sadness of rejection but in fact the confusion of teeter-tottering from rejection to acceptance and back again.
I’ll share some background on the past few months for context. This past spring I had my first “sleepaway” residency, where for two weeks and primarily on somebody else’s dime I got to live off the grid in a private studio with space to dance and dream (shoutout to the Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, GA). I made an enormous amount of progress on a new solo show and came out with so much momentum and joy in my practice, as well as a strong desire to find some kind of support or platform that would help me keep developing the solo and eventually premiere it, because although I’ve self-produced a number of times in the past it is incredibly emotionally and financially draining to do so and I simply would prefer not to (more on that one day, maybe). So I started applying the fuck out of every opportunity I could find, including the big ones that I’d never considered before, like Creative Capital and the MAP Fund - not because I thought I had a good shot but because it was like hey, I’m working on something pretty major for me at a level I haven’t felt in years, I’m excited about it, and maybe yall big funders want to support me, if not that’s cool too. In the late spring there was another cool development: the Pivot Arts Festival, where I had applied and then premiered the first episode of my dance reality TV series The Real Dance in 2021, reached out to ask about showing something this year, and my partner Grace McCants and I ended up getting to premiere Episode 2 of that series, which we co-created and co-directed, and audiences had a really enthusiastic response to it. I was like, hey, things are going somewhere! I have this new solo project I’m amped about, I have an iterative collaborative dance TV series that people love, I’m gaining traction, people are reaching out, I did a fucking sleepaway residency for the first time ever, I Am An Artist And A Professional.
Now let me zoom in on a couple of specific opportunities I was applying for along the way. As some folks may be familiar, in Chicago, one of the main/only specific funders for dance is the aptly named Chicago Dancemakers Forum. I don’t know how well this generalization will correlate with their self-description, but I’d say they’re primarily known for their Lab Artist Award, which is a huge chunk of cash that goes to about 4-6 dance artists annually, and for a handful of other intermittent programs that fund and present dance work. One of those other programs is a festival called Elevate Chicago Dance, which after a pandemic hiatus was announced as an open-application opportunity in late spring 2022 for performance/presentation in October 2022. I applied to Elevate with two different projects - to show a work-in-progress excerpt of my solo and to rescreen me and Grace’s film.
And, what do you know - they BOTH got accepted. I was thrilled! In early July I got a phone call in the middle of work and the sound cut out a lot in the voicemail that was left and cut out again when I called the curator back and was trying to hear what she said her name was and the whole thing felt very awkward, but I was also able to gather that not one but both of my submissions had been accepted to this cool paid festival put on by the big-time local funder. Let me tell you: I felt so special. I texted Grace: “I have some exciting news.”
And then almost immediately I started feeling sad, more or less because I started thinking about other people besides myself. I had friends who’d submitted to Elevate as well, and I didn’t even want to reach out to ask if they’d been accepted because I didn’t want to share that I had been if they hadn’t. I thought about the friends in shitty endless job searches, the peers I ask to read my applications and I read theirs, the folks I don’t have any relationship with but probably got their hopes up about this thing, and I just had a huge feeling of sadness and shame and discomfort about this moment of being one of the chosen ones. It also suddenly felt incredibly high pressure. I have barely performed live since the pandemic - which is its own topic I feel all kinds of (bad) ways about - and now it felt like so much would be riding on showing I was worthy of and had something legit to offer this opportunity.
Simultaneously with all of this, I started working on my application for CDF’s Lab Artist Award, the big cash grant, which was due at the beginning of August. I’ve applied to this opportunity a few times in the past and made it to the finalist round in 2020, but it felt like this year was probably the best shot I’d ever had. Added to my hopefulness was that CDF had announced they were prioritizing certain historically underrepresented applicant demographics that year, and one of those checkboxes was a fit for me. They also were offering feedback on applications in advance; I sent mine in and got back an email that said “Wow, Nora. This is all exemplary!” As I hit the submit button I was dreaming of taking a couple months off my day job in 2023 to work on my creative practice full time; maybe CDF would have connections to help me identify a presenting partner for my solo.
When you’re applying for your job over and over again, you more or less have to fully imagine your future in that job in order to present a compelling argument for receiving it; when that imagined future dissolves away with the arrival of a rejection, it can really sting. When I got my Lab Artist rejection in mid August, there was no question that whoever had made it to the finalist round deserved it, and rationally I hadn’t been counting on it anyway. But the fullness with which I had dreamed up the next stage, coupled with the sense of positive momentum and feedback, heightened the usual feelings and 360-degree questioning that normally come with rejection. The first phase of these went like this:
I straight up was just sad. Strongly connected with the feeling of like, damn, I really did want to do all that shit I told them I was gonna do in my application, and where to with my little project dreams now?
I felt embarrassed imagining panelists being like, This kid? Nah. (Connected to the fact that my Vimeo account notifications indicated they might not have really looked at my work samples.)
I felt embarrassed about even feeling so salty and sad in the first place. Like, who do you think you are/do you think you’re more deserving and special than others/were you so foolish as to be expecting to get this?/these problems are not that real or serious, so you need to chill.
The next phase was more like:
Okay but funny how you also felt sad/bummed/weird pretty soon after GETTING a smaller fancy opportunity from this institution. The recap is we’re looking at here is: Get the special thing, feel special, then feel sad. Don’t get the special thing, feel sad. Rinse, repeat, and? What else? (At least one person reading this is like, “that’s depression,” and another is like, “that’s capitalism,” and a third is like, “that’s an oversimplification of emotions in part because you’re conflating specialness with what is also sometimes just needed income to live.” Heard and agreed across the board.)
Okay so if this isn’t the way you’re going to support your work going forward then what’s the plan? How important to you are these projects? If you said they really matter to you then what are you going to do to try to see them through in other ways, even if not as fancy or special/requiring more self-support?
Speaking of fancyness and specialness, what is UP with this cycle of pursuing the fancy and special? Is this what my future holds, just endlessly riding my little horsey round and round the carousel of seeking specialness, up and down with acceptance and rejection but perpetually on the same psychological ride?
I mean yeah that is exactly what it is. You and everybody else, bro! You think you’re special in being frustrated with specialness?!
Okay but what else is out there? Why am I extra feeling it if this is normal? Did it ever feel different from this? If so, why?
This is boring. I am bored. Sure, the specialness cycle is annoying and sad and discouraging, but processing it is also just taking a lot of my energy while being just straight up not that interesting as a way of life.
The place where this all leads me is that I don’t want anyone’s creative practice to live and die by the specialness economy. It doesn’t build community, it doesn’t bring people together, it’s an unsustainable method for making art that’s meaningful. Even when it’s working for me, it sucks to feel like that means it’s not working for others. And yes, everything I’m saying here is also known as capitalism, is a cozy little pocket of capitalism as it plays out in the specific space of the arts where many talented people are competing for few opportunities and where succeeding in those opportunities can mean being complicit with gatekeeping others (and also fuck the talented part or whatever; all artists should have the resources to make their work and pursue their interests at a level that is nourishing to them, whether or not I or anybody else likes their work). And obviously capitalism is not neutral but is more ruthless and relentless to Black and brown people, gender marginalized people, disabled people, undocumented people, people without any generational class privilege. What stands out to me in the space of the arts is the way the tools of this centuries-old system manage to masquerade so very well as happy, dreamy prizes for those deserving…actually, nevermind, that’s just meritocracy mythology doing its usual thing. Why am I acting all surprised? Regardless - not only for myself but in solidarity with folks more marginalized than I ever will be as a white artist, amidst however my other identities continue to be shaped - I am interested in redirecting more of my energy to helping build options outside the specialness economy. I will always celebrate the success and deserved recognition of fellow artists when the specialness light shines on any of us - I just want there to be more out there, and for that more to be a little...more sustainable. A theme park beyond the carousel.
When I ask myself why the specialness economy might be seeming more tiresome or shitty right now in my little corner of the arts world, as well as what I might do about it as an individual within community, there are two broad thoughts on abundance that come to mind.
The first is a little bit of a Because Pandemic analysis. Prior to the pandemic, Chicago had a rich ecosystem of what I call “low-stakes, high-investment” performance spaces and opportunities. These often took the form of weekly, monthly, or otherwise regularly recurring performance series hosted at bars, studios, or other informal venues that were created and run by artists for artists, where many different forms of live work were often welcome, and which generally had low barriers to entry for performers. A few that come to mind just from my limited memory are Salonathon, It’s Happening!, Research Project, Black Coffee Brown Sugar, Jello, Dance Chance, Mixtape, Paper Machete; I know there were many others. Like in a natural ecosystem, new series were always popping up as old ones were dying off; different series had different vibes; I personally loved some and found others meh; some were just friends curating friends and others had formal submission processes. But the result, at least in my experience and memory, was that it felt like it was possible to get your work seen, and just as importantly to be in community with others sharing and witnessing each other’s work, on a consistent basis, without having to rely on highly competitive grants and performance platforms alone. As part of this ecosystem, if you were just a modest little mushroom or orchid looking to tap into the vibe, there were roots and branches and loamy lobbies to get in on. I honestly sometimes feel like I owe my entire creative aesthetic to this ecosystem - to the models I had for people trying shit out and being supported in doing so, and to my own chances to try shit out and see how it worked and learn from it (and hey, maybe get someone to film it so it could be work sample footage). And all of this was outside of or at least differentiated from the specialness economy, which certainly existed as well but at least didn’t have quite the same central gravitational pull that it seems to have right now. It does seem like these events are slowly reemerging, the landscape is growing back, even though I don’t feel all the way in touch with what’s out there right now. I’m glad to see this because we need it. The lower-stakes, community-based spaces, the ones that are actually not that fancy and that might just seem kind of regular but where you can find yourself in the mix with people just trying shit, now seem crucial to me in a way I think I took for granted in the past.
My second thought is the classic idea to create the thing you wish existed. In other words, for myself closing out this essayic/emotional processing stage, if I want there to be abundance for myself and other artists outside the specialness economy, what shall I do? Create a new work-in-progress performance series like the ones I described above and used to be part of? Find some sort of massive grant to start a whole new performance production platform that…somehow manages to not become its own competitive specialness monster? Put my energy into advocating for guaranteed income programs for artists, or at the very least expanded government funding for the arts (been doing that but maybe more)? Try to open a new dance and performance co-op at the geographical center of the city and invite friends and peers and admired strangers to teach class, hold talks, maybe just hang out in the lobby and shoot the shit because at the end of the day my deepest learning and joy in creative community has taken place while hanging out in the lobby shooting the shit? (Or perhaps going across the street for a beverage.) My mind scans through these ideas with alternating enthusiasm and listlessness.
I wrote most of this on a Friday, and on Saturday afternoon I was hanging out at the Point when I got to talking with an actor/comedian/creator friend-of-a-friend who had just moved back to Chicago from LA. Even though his career trajectory, sub-industries, and identities are all very different from mine, somehow within 15 minutes of talking, this was where we were at: discussing the specialness economy, specialness whiplash, and the general experience of navigating through different ways of pursuing your work, your dreams, your income, the pathways mainstream society makes you feel like you should be on, the pathways you forge on your own terms, and all the intersections thereof. And it felt so good to talk together, even though much of what we were discussing was stuff that’s frustrating or confusing - I think because some kind of shared or mirrored experience across so much difference was encouraging, and gave me new ideas for what to try and simply how to understand my own life. So that’s all I have to end with. I am not furious, not out here to condemn anyone for creating or participating in the special, and certainly expect to be applying and asking for that specialness for a long time to come. But my plan is to give at least as much energy to literally any version of community - which I’ll define for the time being as regular old connecting with people and their art and supporting each other through listening, sharing, witnessing, and just hanging out - as I do to pursuing the special. Not sure this is too much of a change from what I was doing already, but it feels clear right now. I’ll let you know how it goes.
My thoughts above were most immediately influenced by conversations with Evvie Allison, Anjal Chande (“there’s a difference between specialness and community”), Grace McCants, Christina Chammas, Gina Hoch-Stall, and Neal Dandade, as well as further back reading and listening to some of Miguel Gutierrez’s recent work on artmaking and grants/philanthropy. Thanks to all.
End
Thanks for reading, there should be a way to share this if you'd like to, you're always welcome to unsubscribe (should be built into the email at the bottom somewhere? and I'm not receiving notifications when people do if that's any encouragement), no idea when I'll send one of these out again, hope to see you offline soon.