City Drops the Curtain on Fringe Fest Funding Arts

Every August, tens of thousands of theater devotees flock to performance spaces in downtown Manhattan – creaky black boxes, basement proscenium stages, big stadium-seating auditoriums, cramped little corners of formerly-smoky venues – to witness the offerings of FringeNYC, New York’s international theater festival that celebrates the small, the indie and the overlooked.

Fringe sells tickets for each of their 1,100 shows for $18 – a necessary increase from $15 in previous years, but still a bargain compared to Off-Broadway prices. Much of their revenue comes from ticket sales, but the festival still depends on outside funding, like the grant from the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) it has received for the past seven years. After seeing a big drop in funding for 2013 – $26,000, after a few years at about $50,000 – FringeNYC’s producing artistic director Elena Holy was shocked to find out that the amount for fiscal year 2014 dropped all the way to zero.

Holy explained that while the festival operates on about 90 percent earned income, they rely on the DCA funding for their expanded programming.

“The special events that we do for the public, much of which are free, or we provide subsidized tickets for, like FringeHIGH [plays aimed at teen audiences] and FringeJR [for families and kids aged 5 to 12] thatmake it feel like a festival,” Holy said. It’s kind of what augments it to be more than just 1,100 performances that go on every August. It’s really hard to make something feel like a festival in New York City.”

FringeNYC also produces Fringe Al Fresco, a roster of plays presented at various outdoor locations during the festival for free, as well as talkbacks, educational panels for theater artists, art workshops, and networking events for theater professionals. These are the programs that Holy and her colleagues are considering how to fund for the upcoming fiscal year.

“For each FringeHIGH show we make up to 20 tickets available to teens for $5 [and] neither we nor the artists make anything on these tickets,” said Meggan Dodd, the volunteer director of FringeHIGH. “Without the grant [from DCA], we may have to cut back on the shows and tickets we can make available to teens. That would be a great loss — to us, to the artists, to the teens, and to the vitality and future of NYC.”

Part of the difficulty for an organization like the Fringe festival is that due to the fiscal budget calendar the city uses, it is forced to apply for funding before its programming is solidified, which they will receive (or not, as was the case this year) after the festival is over. In other words, Fringe submitted its application for a grant from DCA for the 2014 festival in February of this year, when they were still sorting through about 800 applications from all over the world for slots in the summer line-up. Fast forward to the fall, when the festival is over, and the DCA releases its grants for the fiscal year. It’s exactly that catch-22 scenario that Holy said contributed to their loss of funding this year.

“The [DCA] panel always starts with how much they love us, how respected we are as an institution and how we’re such an important part of the ecology of the city. Then it comes down to, how did we fill out the boxes on the forms,” Holy said.

“One thing they said is they want to see more detail about what we’re going to be doing [for the festival]” she said. But it’s impossible to tell at that early stage what plays will be produced, whether the festival will lean heavily on avante garde clowning or comedic one-acts or indie musicals – it’s all still being decided when the funding applications are due.

“We’re dedicated to new artists, emerging artists,” Holy said. “If we had people applying two years before the festival, I don’t know if it would work.”

While the Fringe offers artists a performance venue and help with marketing, participants must produce and pay for the shows themselves, which includes funding rehearsal space, sometimes paying actors, musicians and crew members, and paying for additional marketing, costumes, sets, etc. Holy said that many of the small companies and individual artists who apply to Fringe do their own fundraising and wouldn’t be able to plan for something two years in advance.

The Department of Cultural Affairs doles out grants from a Cultural Development Fund with roughly $32 million to dispense – a number that seems high, but doesn’t go very far considering that over 1,000 groups in all five boroughs apply for funding.

“Groups submit applications and a panel of professionals in the field and representatives from city government and each of the boroughs reviews the applications and makes recommendations on funding,” said Ryan Max, the deputy director of external affairs at DCA. He said that this year, they’re funding about 900 groups, and encourage those who didn’t receive funding to get feedback and find out why.

Holy said that she’s open to that feedback, but also that it may not be worth the time commitment – it takes a few months to go through the application process, with a full-time staff of only two – to apply again. Fringe has launched a campaign on the website Fundly, hoping to raise $20,000 in the next month. So far, 30 supporters have pledged a total of $1,638. Holy is also actively seeking corporate partners to come on board for their 20th anniversary, in two years.

“We really want to keep doing this programming, it’s important to us and important to this community,” Holy said. As for relying on the city to fund it, she said, “it’s hard to keep the faith.”