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Reimagining For-Profit and Non-Profit Business Structures
A conversation between disruptorS Gypsy snider & DANIEL EZRALOW
the thought x the dance edit extra
THE DANCE EDIT EXTRA In this premium audio interview series, a companion to The Dance Edit Podcast, you’ll get insight and inspiration from the artists who are making dance-world headlines. Listen to the episode live The Dance Edit.
GYPSY SNIDER is a Canadian–American director, choreographer, and former acrobat. She co-founded The 7 Fingers, an artist collective, and choreographed Pippin in 2013
DANIEL EZRALOW is an artistic director, choreographer, writer and performer. He is known for his work in theater, film, opera, and television. His approach, style of physical expression, freedom of spirit and articulate athletic vocabulary have earned him an international reputation.
The conversation begins with a question about how the each model affects the process of creation.
GYPSY SNIDER For me, the idea of public funding, a society investing in staples of its society, meaning education, healthcare, and science and culture means that we are all under a united premise that culture is key to society and the evolution of society. I would even go so far as not just culture, but creativity, like the scientific and sociological necessity for creativity in a culture. So when you are creating using public funding, it is a very pragmatic necessity to create art for the exercise of creating art. It is not for creating something that will be successful either financially or necessarily that the audience has to like it. So for me, the necessity of a nonprofit is exactly that - it's creating art without the goal of creating for profit. Now wonderfully, sometimes art catches on fire and everybody loves it and then money or success comes with that.
But when you solely create art with the need to survive financially, or to become successful financially, that impacts the creative process. The neurological creative process becomes completely tampered with. So on a very scientific level, to be truly creative you need to not need to do it for money, and you also need to not do it to have people love you. That is something that I think in America, it's very difficult to understand. I think if you go see art that makes you angry or that you think isn't good, you get angry. "Why did I spend my time doing this?" Well, if you don't cultivate the true, true, true freedom of expression, then we're in a fabricated world. And unfortunately, capitalism is a fabricated world that only works for those who can succeed by mass production or mass consumption.
“So for me, the necessity of a nonprofit is exactly that - it's creating art without the goal of creating for profit.”
-Gypsy snider
DANIEL EZRALOW That was wonderful, Gypsy. I rather agree with you on the premise that you're making. The first premise is that art is a necessity and art is a necessity for society. And sorry to say, America doesn't see it as a necessity. Our schools pay for mathematics, for reading, for writing, but there are dyslexic kids that can make paintings beyond your imagination. We don't fund that in the same way. We don't see art as a necessity. There's no question in my mind that we've got it wrong in America. I think Europe has a government funded society of cultural institutions. You can be a choreographer, you can be a dancer, you can be a painter and you can live a normal life.
In terms of the good and bad nonprofit, it opens up a bit of a Pandora's box. I started dancing late in my life. Up to the age of college, I was really looking at pre-med and other things and I took a dance class. It changed my life because I understood that I could speak. I didn't care about money at all. I just needed to dance. So going to New York, I became a dancer and all I wanted to do was dance. I danced in the nonprofit world, the modern dance scene, which was Lar Lubovitch and Paul Taylor.
What I came from, my father being an accountant, he busted his bum to make sure that his kids could have a living. So when I broke away from New York nonprofit world and took myself to Connecticut with Moses and Momix, I said to myself, "Why won't people pay for what I do? What I do is valuable. Why do I have to ask people for money to do something that I think is very valid?" So therefore we started creating our art in a way that people would pay for it. Now, is that all of a sudden corrupting the art mind or not? It's a big discussion because I actually think that art is about communication.
So in a way it's not about profit or nonprofit, it's about keeping connected to the people, keeping connected to humanity. And I believe that should be paid for from the government, first of all, which it doesn't happen. But what I never was able to do, I was never able to go to someone to say, "Please give me $10,000. I need to do a project." I could never do it. So therefore I could never sit in the non-profit world. I just didn't have the ability to ask people for financing.
“So in a way it's not about profit or nonprofit, it's about keeping connected to the people, keeping connected to humanity.”
-daniel ezralow
Photo by Louis Greenfield
GYPSY SNIDER However, I had to do more asking for money for my LLC in terms of investment than I ever did when I used public funding. And I don't think of nonprofit as asking the government. It's the people's money. I left the States at 18 because I grew up in the nonprofit and I was like, "This is bullshit. I don't want to be poor doing what I'm doing." My parents struggled through the seventies and eighties to create art. In other countries where art is subsidized, is people go to art all of the time. So getting people to go to the theater or go to a museum in America, it's like it has to be cool. It has to be the 'it' thing. But in Europe you go to your local theater in the middle of Hodunk, France, you go every week, you go at least twice a month. And most times people would come to our shows and I don't even think they knew what they were coming to see. You just went to the theater because there was theater.
DANIEL EZRALOW Because the basic nature of art is ingrained and woven into the society, which America, sadly to say, didn't do.
GYPSY SNIDER Yeah. And I'd like to also sort of agree with you, because you speak about the responsibility of creating something good in this moment of communication, showing up as an artist to exchange with the audience, which I really, really can relate to. So when I create work, I feel responsible to give something to the audience, to open their hearts and their minds and nurture that connectivity that Daniel's talking about. As well, the principle of a society saying that art doesn't have to be good or bad. It should not be defined in that way to purely cultivate "I'm going to give money so that people who are creative can continue to be creative." This freedom of trying things, for me, that that is at the heart of what a nonprofit should do for a society.
Now, just because you're an artist doesn't mean that you get to sit back.... There was a part of me in France, for example, where people would get so much money and then they would just sort of wallow in it in this creative state and do one performance a year. And I'm like, that's not it either.
Photo by Kathleen Finlay
“This freedom of trying things, for me, that is at the heart of what a nonprofit should do for a society.” -gypsy snider
DANIEL EZRALOW And I think what an artist’s responsibility is to stay out of the ego. Ultimately what we do, whether we're profit or non-profit, is we serve. Ultimately, what I'm doing is giving people what they need, whether we're profit or nonprofit, you can make them both work. People have made them both work. Dave Parsons is a good friend. He has to raise, I don't know, 5 million a year to keep his company. And he does great. He's totally nonprofit. I've never been nonprofit. I just don't think we're ever devoid of people that are paying us, whether it's a philanthropic payment or whether it's, "I'll give you 10 bucks for that dance."
GYPSY SNIDER And then of course what's interesting is the place where I really landed after eight years in Europe and Montreal - I feel at home in a very different way than I do in the States. And I think it's because the socialized democracy in Canada really embraced both levels, like European and American. And Cirque de Soleil kind of invented this thing. I don't know if it really existed before them, where they were a nonprofit and a for-profit. We wanted to do corporate work, we wanted to do televised and film work. That was just exciting, fun stuff that I always wanted to do that didn't really fit in the nonprofit model. So having both from the beginning was really important.
DANIEL EZRALOW Yes, we've got to support nonprofit. No question, no question in my mind. Yes, we've got to keep philanthropy going. Yes, we've got to keep the big companies, the Bezos' and the Elon Musks throwing a billion dollars at the arts because it'll heal more than the missiles that are being shot into Ukraine. No question.
GYPSY SNIDER Making a company, and we're also a collective, so it's very particular. There's seven of us. We always wanted to think and create outside of the box. And we have almost zero policies in our company and everyone thinks we're crazy because every time we start a project, we start from scratch. But we did want to create a box within which we could be creative and that meant creating a building, it meant creating an infrastructure. So for example, at the 7 Fingers, all seven of us earn the same amount of money and any project that we do goes into the company and we just get a monthly salary.
“A young dancer, a young artist must go inside and identify what they need because the need is the most important thing for the artist.” -Daniel ezralow
GYPSY SNIDER So we started by founding the nonprofit because we wanted to apply for grants that were available. Very quickly though, we had done corporate work, we wanted to continue doing commercial work, and we also wanted our margin of profit to rise. And very much what Daniel's saying is I would like to be paid for some of the innovative and incredible work that we're able to do. So that's why very quickly we created the for-profit.
What I would say to young people right now is that I believe that the nonprofit is a wonderful way to start getting a project going especially if you don't have the content or the means to create creative content in order to get that philanthropic support. And yet the nonprofit should never be a prison. So for example, when we started San Francisco, I became the producer, so I write and create and direct and choreograph. But I'm also a producer which meant I had to go to different people within the community and say, "Would you be interested in investing in this project?" And I needed not just people who were going to invest financially, but people who are also going to invest in terms of community support for this project because creating a company and a long running show in San Francisco, I also need the union, I need politicians, I need the restaurants and shops around the corner to want me to be there. There was a huge amount of community outreach to support that project that I learned from my nonprofit world.
DANIEL EZRALOW I think your model that you just proposed to me is the model and profit, nonprofit... You created the model out of necessity. You said, "I'm going to do this." Basically you went to people and got people that were interested that are investors because of your creativity, 7 Fingers creativity said, "This is interesting." The same way Apple said it. "This is interesting." There are designers, you're designing products. Your products are bodies on stage. Apple's designing AirPods and different things. You're creating a need for your work. To me, that is the model for art and that's what it should be. You can call it profit or nonprofit because it works in both worlds.
What to me actually scares me away from nonprofit is this kind of poverty mentality. We must create something that nobody wants. And we must go to ask foundations for the money because they're the rich people that built all the buildings and they held the money and they're going to do a gracious service of giving us $20,000 so that we... It's like we should do it ourselves. We are creative to the point of where we can build the buildings. We are responsible to do what you did in San Francisco.
A young dancer, a young artist must go inside and identify what they need because the need is the most important thing for the artist.
GYPSY SNIDER I would have to agree one hundred million percent that you have to be authentic to what your needs are. And when you're growing a plant, you need a seed, you need dirt, you need water, you need sun, you need air. And so whatever your environment is, if you have any kind of vision, you're going to always add all those components or it's not going to grow.
