The <100K Project is an attempt to “bring the arts back home” to small and rural communities with populations under 100,000. The organization will have three main areas of focus:
- Education: the skills necessary for creating healthy, engaged arts organizations in smaller communities will require a set of skills and a general artistic orientation that usually go untaught in traditional theatre departments. The <100K Project will devise a curriculum to support this mission, and promote it to colleges and universities throughout the US, possibly including a distance learning component.
- Support: the goal of the <100K Project is to provide salaries to artists staffing arts organizations created by this project in small and rural communities. The <100K Project central organization will provide centralized fundraising, bookkeeping and marketing services, health insurance and retirement benefits, as well as continual training and support.
- Promotion: It is important that the arts in small and rural communities be promoted throughout the US as an alternative to the Myth of Broadway that currently dominates the imaginations of young artists. This will be accomplished in a variety of ways, including publications, speeches, residencies, and the documentation of art work, processes, and organizational strategies.
This organization will rely on the creativity of many people. The strength of the <100K Project will rest on continual innovation and change. I welcome your ideas, no matter how seemingly crazy.
Scott Walters
Founder, <100K Project
I am a theater artist and teacher who moved back to my small home town from the big city of Seattle. I found you through a link to your essay on the Walmart-ing of Theatre posted on our PlayGroup blog by one of the members in my writers group in Portland, OR. I loved it!
These are some of the same ideas I have been mulling over ever since I dropped out of the cookie cutter PATP/MFA Acting Program at U of WA nearly 20 years ago– but I kinda thought I was all alone. How wonderful to find out it ain’t necessarily so!
I’ve worked as an actor, director, writer, general theatrical collaborator and (most lucratively), teacher for more then 20 years. I am committed to doing theatre that matters, that engages, that honors the bond between performer and audience. I struggle with who is “allowed’ to write plays, whose stories are heard and who gets to hear them. I continue to search for ways to use my skills to make a living and make a contribution to my community.
I am intrigued by your Project and would love to hear more about it .
Thanks for your work. It is most heartening.
Althea Hukari
Sorry to be so late discovering your comment! I think your experience is shared by many people, Althea, and we all feel isolated because nobody is promoting these ideas in any way. As teachers, we find ourselves facing colleagues still desperately clinging to the idea that preparing students for NYC is a viable and ultimately rewarding approach. And as theatre becomes less and relevant to more and more people, the situation becomes ever grimmer.
Perfect time for a new paradigm!
I also am in agreement in regards to the need for a new paradigm, and that a continual pull towards a single “cultural capital” simply doesn’t work. Decentralization is, after all, one of the cornerstones of American political thought.
One question I do have, however, is whether or not the 100k line is something hard and fast, or something more mutable. My town, Savannah GA, comes in around 130k in the last census, but also has yet to manage to sustain a working professional theatre. This is something many of us are trying to remedy.
We hope there is room to potentially work with the <100k project. If not, then I (at least) am still an enthusiastic supporter.
Eric — Everything is still in flux, so let’s keep Savannah on the table. Glad to have you on board.
Hello, Scott! I just discovered this blog yesterday and have been impressed by quite a few of the ideas knocking about. I’m currently enrolled in a theatre design MFA program at Humboldt State in NorCal, but I have also recently finished another master’s program in sociology with an emphasis on environmental and community studies. My master’s thesis was entitled Sustainable Theatre: An Analysis of Theory and Practice, and worked with many of the same concepts and issues you’ve presented here. I’ve recently started a blog to house online versions of my thesis, as well as provide a forum for other resources I discover. I’ve added a link to this site onto my own, and if you have the opportunity to pay me a visit at http://sustaintheatre.blogspot.com/ , it would be great to have the opportunity to chat more with you.
Also, I was particularly interested in your posts on Del-Tec. I would love to be up to date on any progress you’ve had with the company. Very exciting!
All the best,
Calder Johnson
Calder — Welcome to <100K Project, and thanks for prividing a link on your blog. I am working my way through your very interesting thesis right now. I think we need to talk further. Please contact me at swalters@unca.edu
I am very excited to read about this project and would like to know a great deal more.
My partner and I have been in the process of developing a theatre group we call the Northeast Texas Traveling Theatre (NET3) whose goal is “to provide live theatre to under served areas: theatre for the people, by the people. The areas we hope to serve are all small communities, to which we would like to take live theatre . Our hope is not only to promote live theatre to those folks in an affordable space, but provide a venue for new actors, playwrights, and technical people to present their work.
while we have access to technical people, playwrights, and actors, all of whom would be willing to lend their talents for little or nothing, we continue to be hampered by funding to get this project on the road, so to speak. Have you any suggestions?