About Art Intercepts
This blog aims to spark curiosity for Midwestern art and artists, illuminating performing arts communities living and working in “flyover country.”
Covering the Midwest since 2009.
Amid a sharp decline in critical outlets, Art Intercepts fills gaps with authentic, immediate, informed responses to the performing and visual arts.
Rigorous play and rhetorical experimentation.
We are open to new approaches to criticism while maintaining journalistic standards of practice.
Based in Central Illinois, Art Intercepts founder and editor Lauren Warnecke is a reporter for NPR affiliate station WGLT and freelance arts and culture critic, primarily reviewing dance for the Chicago Tribune. Lauren enjoys cooking, cycling and attempting to grow things in her backyard. Sometimes, she succeeds. More about Lauren.
hi lauren w,
i really enjoyed the article on dance company administration. many years ago, I was approached to be GM of a modern dance company that would be considered a major company.
I didnt take the gig, as the salary was so low, that I could not survive in NYC on it (and I am not one for any kind of lavish lifestyle, then or now). Further and even more important, even if I could figure out how to survive on the pittance of the salary, I got a sense that the artistic vision was there, but there would be little support of innovative ideas or marketing and fund raising on the part of a GM by the head of the company, whose name branded the troupe. T here was a stubborn aspect of being set in their ways; and those ways were not working and were not going to change, sadly.
Suffice to say, once the principal died, so did the company. And I am talking about a major figure in modern dance.
Also, I think Michael Kaiser’s comment about not raising up the next generation of administrators is too true. There is not so much an attitude of ‘after me, the deluge’, as much as issues of trust and acceptance of other ways to do things(see first part of the note.)
Finally, it would be valuable to get honest feedback from that ‘revolving door’ of administrators, as to why they have moved on from jobs so often….and the perceptions of the companies they left, as to why they left. There might be some interesting and varied data there.
I have not presented dance in decades, but I miss it very much. Even though it is not something I ‘do’ now, the epiphinal moment for me, in terms of a life in the arts, was
through seeing a ballet performance-specifically a solo by Jacques D’Amboise at Lincoln Center. It hit me like a lighting bolt. I knew I just had to have something in my life like what I was witnessing.