Artistic administrators are usually in the highlight twice: When they’re appointed and once they depart. But taking a look at what occurs a number of years into a tenure — particularly one that features a international pandemic — will be a useful train for anyone in arts administration.
After a decade because the inventive director of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, in the East Village, Mia Yoo has in some way established continuity with the aesthetics and priorities established by her predecessor, Ellen Stewart, whereas additionally forging her personal path.
With the theater’s sixtieth season nearing its finish (it’s at the moment presenting “God’s Fool,” a new work about Saint Francis of Assisi by the dance-theater grasp Martha Clarke), Yoo sat down to speak about two issues in fixed dialog, or maybe in a fixed tug of battle, at her establishment: the previous and the current.
The first nonetheless looms over La MaMa, which for many years was carefully recognized with Stewart, its gung-ho, charismatic founder. Over 50 years, she nurtured La MaMa into a performing arts incubator of worldwide reputation. And then, in 2011, she died.
“I always say Ellen could have burned this place down if she wanted to, because she built it,” mentioned Yoo, who picked up the artistic-director baton when she was in her early 40s, about the identical age Stewart was when she created LaMaMa in 1961. “I know she wouldn’t do that, but there’s a part of me that thought she could because she created it. Now it’s up to us as a community to make sure that it continues.”
On a current afternoon, she guided me via a hard-hat tour of La MaMa’s flagship four-story dwelling at 74A East Fourth Street. The Nineteenth-century constructing, which the corporate bought in 1967, is in the center of a $24 million intestine renovation — financed by town and state of New York, in addition to varied foundations and donors — that can lastly convey it as much as fashionable requirements. The efficiency areas are being upgraded, an elevator is lastly being put in to make sure accessibility, and a knowledge community will help the most recent in video and audio expertise.
Throughout the seemingly endless building — the reopening has been pushed a number of occasions and is now scheduled for this fall, or perhaps spring 2023 — reveals have continued to be made. That’s as a result of Stewart had the forethought to take a position in actual property: La MaMa owns 88,000 sq. toes unfold over 4 buildings inside strolling distance of each other, in addition to a property in Umbria, Italy, that’s used for playwriting and directing workshops.
Yoo and I had moved on to 66 East Fourth Street, which homes the corporate archive and the mainstage Ellen Stewart Theater. Sitting in the primary row, Yoo warmly greeted kids from the Brooklyn United Music and Arts Program, an after-school mission that has been working with La MaMa since 2015. The kids had been getting ready for a efficiency of their present “B.U. Live” later that day.
Yoo herself has come of artistic age at La MaMa. Starting in the early 2000s, she labored with Stewart — “there was something symbiotic and mutual in terms of what we were wanting to create,” she mentioned — and finally her mentor anointed her the brand new inventive director. No exploratory committee, no nationwide search: Stewart determined that Yoo can be subsequent, and that was that.
In the following decade, Yoo has steered the ship very in a different way from the way in which Stewart did — and, because it turned out, extra in sync with the conduct anticipated from inventive administrators as of late.
“They have almost polar opposite leadership styles,” Lois Weaver, a member of the long-running efficiency firm Split Britches, mentioned in a video chat. “Ellen was very, very much in charge: It was her theater, she had the last word, she made all the decisions. She loved her family very, very much, but it was a very, very tough love. Mia’s leadership style is a collaborative style, and her love is an extended-care kind of style. She looks after the well-being and the welfare of each of the artists and also the staff: They make collective and collaborative decisions rather than slightly autocratic decisions.”
This has led to administration that’s much less top-down than Stewart’s reign — not straightforward when it might generally be extra expedient to simply inform somebody to do one thing.
“I tried to create an environment where we get consensus from a lot of different people, and a lot of people then ultimately become invested in how we’re moving forward,” Yoo mentioned. “We have a lot of different programs: a play-reading series, a puppet series, the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, the Coffeehouse Chronicles series, and each of them has its own person running it,” she continued. “I try to give them as much freedom as possible.”
The programming director of the Club, one of many areas at 74A, and the curator of La MaMa Moves!, Nicky Paraiso embodies each this collaborative strategy and the establishment’s fixed negotiation between an awe-inspiring legacy — which nurtured the careers of Harvey Fierstein, Sam Shepard, Diane Lane, Al Pacino and even David and Amy Sedaris — and the longer term. He appeared in the Jeff Weiss present “Dark Twist” at La MaMa in 1979, however not like others, he basically by no means left. This has helped give him a chicken’s-eye view of curating as he and Yoo strive to determine the right way to stability the wants and approaches of various generations.
“I’ll say, ‘Do we keep presenting such and such an artist? Are they doing the same work that they were doing 20 years ago?’” Paraiso mentioned in a video dialog. “And Mia would say, ‘Ellen created this space for people to nurture their art and then they become part of the family of La MaMa.’”
As with each firm, the programming will be uneven, although the ratio of hits to misses appears to have improved from the place it was towards the tip of Stewart’s tenure. And this has been completed by hanging a delicate stability between older artists and newcomers.
In the primary class is Split Britches, which has been presenting reveals at La MaMa for a lot of its 40-year existence and in October will current “Last Gasp: A Recalibration,” an in-person manufacturing of its acclaimed pandemic video mission “Last Gasp WFH.” And then you may have somebody just like the 30-year-old multidisciplinary artist John Maria Gutierrez, who in May carried out the solo present “Rockefeller and I Part 1,” contrasting his expertise because the son of Dominican immigrants with the lifetime of John D. Rockefeller Jr., on the sidewalk exterior 66 East Fourth Street.
When he was nonetheless in highschool, Gutierrez was mentored by the composer, author and director Elizabeth Swados, a pillar of La MaMa. He graduated from New York University and he, too, discovered his inventive dwelling in the East Village, becoming a member of La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company. “It was after Ellen had passed and I was the newest member,” he mentioned in a video chat. “It was Mia who brought me in and checked up on me. She kept inviting me into her office and asking, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’”
Yoo additionally guess on the longer term when it got here to exploring expertise’s influence on the performing arts.
In a 2011 article introducing her as the brand new head of La MaMa, The New York Times famous that “Ms. Yoo is championing a high-tech project called CultureHub that allows theatermakers in different countries to work together by video conference. She calls this system, which allows for life-size images, ‘Skype on steroids.’” (When he was president of the Seoul Institute of the Arts, Yoo Duk-hyung — Yoo’s father, whom Stewart had adopted — spearheaded CultureHub as a joint mission with La MaMa.)
Fast ahead to March 2020, when town’s live-performance venues shut down amid the pandemic. LaMaMa did, too, however it instantly pivoted to online programming that included every part from kids’s reveals to new work and chats with legacy and rising artists. Unlike nearly all of its New York brethren, La MaMa not solely knew what livestreaming was but in addition had the infrastructure to implement it.
Just like Stewart had invested in bodily property, Yoo had staked a declare on the digital world. “I believe that artists need to be a part of that conversation — it can’t be just technologists and corporations that are in that internet space,” she mentioned. “It’s not going to just be about money or about power, but about how we explore our humanity.”
As La MaMa remained just about busy — it’s value noting that Yoo did all this whereas being paid about $65,000 in 2020, whereas some high-profile inventive administrators making many occasions that wage basically hibernated — the corporate additionally strengthened its dedication to what it calls a Radical Access Plan. According to its “envisioning statement,” a declaration of intent, that plan consists of bodily and financial accessibility, alternative, illustration and relevance.
The work itself has remained eclectic as ever, reflecting not a lot on our world’s rising fragmentation as the concept artwork can nonetheless play a unifying position. “We want curation of art at this time to be about this multiplicity of perspectives and aesthetics and forms,” Yoo mentioned. “We believe that if we create an environment and a platform for artists to explore and experiment in ways that they themselves didn’t even think possible, that potentially groundbreaking work could happen. And, potentially, new forms could be born.”
Yes, she will be able to sound terminally optimistic, however come on — isn’t that infinitely higher than the choice?
