On Aging Into Power

On Aging into Power

Penny Arcade

n July 28, 2018, I went to New York’s Hilton Hotel to join a panel at a Dramatists Guild conference titled Aging into Power. Arriving early, I Oducked into the conference room next door featuring a panel on How to Sell Your Work. I came in at the very end of the panel, just in time for the Q&A. Looking around the room, I was amazed to see that more than three-quarters of the audience was over fifty years old. As I listened to the questions being asked by these older writers, I figured either that there were a lot of people starting to write plays at an older age, or that these writers had been writing plays for decades and were now seeking workshops on how to sell their work.

The Aging into Power panel was organized by Karen Malpede, a seventy-three- year-old playwright and adjunct associate professor of theatre and environmental justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. The panel also included Nick Forster, a PhD candidate in African-American studies at Yale, who was rep- resenting the eighty-year-old playwright and novelist, Ishmael Reed, as Forster had recently acted in one of Mr. Reed’s plays. I was the third panelist: a poet, experimental theatre-maker, and documentary video artist.

Our panel focused on the problems of older writers in today’s ageist culture and the particular nature of the work of older artists, especially the concept of “late style” promoted by Edward Said, who investigated the nature of work done in later life in his posthumously published manuscript, Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. It is particularly telling that, at this point in time, after thirty years focused almost exclusively on emerging arts by not-for-profit arts institutions in United States, people are starting to talk about the work and careers of older artists.

Predictably, our conference room was packed with people over fifty, but there were also a few people under thirty. When it was my turn to speak, I spoke as a writer who, for decades, has not received any recognition for my own writing. I spoke of the years in New York spent watching much younger artists sail out

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00448 by guest on 29 September 2021 ahead of me into careers I could only dream about. I watched them stop as I kept going without grants and without major or even minor recognition in the U.S., all while building an international career where my writing and work were recognized, ultimately building up my body of work and, more importantly, my abilities.

We who write want attention and recognition for the work itself. This isn’t so much for ourselves: it comes from a feeling of responsibility for the integrity of the writers whose work inspires and precedes us, and in whose wake we follow. As we become older as writers, we understand a certain need for approval because we see who gets it and who does not. We notice how the same small group of writers receives all the grants, residencies, reviews, and mainstage festival pro- ductions. We also see people who once had approval lose it as new generations become the new gatekeepers.

In addition to getting older, being a woman has always been problematic for me. I’ve always been seen as too outspoken or too opinionated or too divisive, rather than being seen as simply offering my views because I had something to say that wasn’t being said. I wanted to make a contribution. If you are a woman with an opinion, or an original point of view, it can only be because you are a troublemaker. When I have mentioned in interviews wanting a wider audience for my work or wanting the leaders of the arts and entertainment industries to know my work, I was often painted as egotistical or even megalomaniacal. In spite of this fact, for the past thirty-five years, I’ve continued to work on the margins of society; the only things buoying me up were my sustained effort and the quality and quantity of my output.

We live in an arts world that is obsessed with potential and dismissive of accom- plishment. The idea that it is only the young artist who is at the forefront of new ideas is flawed. Those of us who have been young know that we gather fragments of ideas along the way, slowly building the vocabulary that will define our work. Today, young artists are put in the position to emerge from their studies fully formed and ready to create a product. They know that they have just a few short years of being viewed in this way before becoming has-beens. The concept of a developmental arc, where an artist’s work develops as their skills and abilities develop, is not in the lexicon of emerging arts practice.

In an era that focuses on tertiary education as the be-all in arts education, artists who develop their work through the age-old process of apprenticeship are viewed with distrust if not disdain by academia. Working-class intellectualism is no longer valued in America. Despite my long, rather storied history in the experimental arts scene responsible for some of the art forms that people now

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00448 by guest on 29 September 2021 get PhDs in, without a university degree, my ideas—even my experience in the creation of those forms—is rarely recognized.

I am passionate about what I have come to see as a misunderstanding about the later stages of life as measured against this idea of emerging arts, where vitality and relevance have been viewed as the domain of youth. Youth, however, is a quality that has nothing to do with age; and the end of life, not only for artists but for all humans, is not the inert, stagnating place that our society’s view on aging deems it be. Instead, it is the time for the completion of character, a work that can be done only at this time in life. Just as fruit ripens, so do the ideas and work of humans.

In the conference room, Forster read an essay written by Ishmael Reed. In the essay, Reed recounted the story of being asked by a New York Times reporter to be part of a photo essay on black writers and the resurgence of interest in their careers. Reed scoffed at this request, writing:

And so, while I might be buried alive in the United States, I’m alive and thriving in the world. Some have not heard of my death in the United States. So, recently, a Times reporter called and said that he wanted me to show up for a photo that would include other black male writers. The story was about a resurgence in black male writers. I had to inform him that The New York Times Book Review had ignored my last five books, and so, for its mainstream audience, I, in no way, would represent a resurgence. And so, recently, in one Times department, I’m alive, and in the other department, I’m dead. My new novel, Conjugating Hindi, for which I studied Hindi, has been ignored by the Times, whose book review editor, an Anglophile, says that her favorite bookstore is in London. The early reviews have come from China and India, and two black critics in the United States, otherwise the novel would be unnoticed. But I really can’t complain. With an international audience, I have been spared the fate of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, who were vilified mercilessly when they became senior citizens.

Ishmael Reed’s words reverberated deeply with me. Since 1993, I have enjoyed a career outside the U.S., where my writing and ideas are almost always discussed, and it is gratifying to find myself at the top of my game at the end of my sixties, touring my new play Longing Lasts Longer for almost four years in over thirty- nine cities internationally; I also found my sex and censorship show Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, which I wrote twenty-eight years ago, in demand and more relevant now than when I wrote it. I am making new work, developing it impro- visationally in front of live audiences, who buy tickets to watch me make work.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00448 by guest on 29 September 2021 In the early 1980s, during a growing conservative trend towards arts funding, the not-for-profit arts sector read the writing on the wall and started to align itself with academia, where the concept of emerging arts originated. By 1985, that concept began to infiltrate the not-for-profit arts world, and today nearly every organization in this country has a mission statement that focuses on emerging arts. Ostensibly created to support and further the careers of young artists, it has long been clear to me that most of the careers that are fostered and grown through this focus are those of the arts administrators and their institutions, as each subsequent generation of emerging artists is dumped for the incoming generation, leaving generations of artists blowing in the wind.

For centuries, there were young artists who became old artists, mastering their form. Why was there suddenly this need for a hothouse environment in which to “grow” artists? Far from providing any meaningful support for young artists, the concept of funding emerging arts does a great disservice to them, by using big grants to buy off artists an early age, and by creating a belief that all artists require the same amount of time to develop their craft and point of view.

The concept of emerging arts is also aimed at the parents of students who are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for their offspring to be educated as actors, poets, writers, painters, filmmakers, choreographers, and dancers—the same amount of money that it takes to educate a dentist or a lawyer or a doctor. These parents want to be assured that there is an entry-level position for their children in the arts, just as there is in law, finance, or medicine. Academia has changed the very meaning of what it is to be an artist from a vocation to a profession.

Yet if the arts were a profession, like being a plumber or even an office clerk, after forty years, one might find a stipend to live on. The truth is that many of us who have spent thirty, forty, or fifty years performing our work in not-for-profits find that when we are of retirement age, there is nothing in our retirement accounts because none of the theatres where we worked every contributed anything for us. Yet, the people who worked in the offices of those not-for-profits have Social Security benefits, 401(k)s, health insurance, and other benefits. What is wrong with this picture? Why are academia and the not-for-profits misleading students and young artists with all this talk of professionalism and career development?

In my experience, emerging arts was a pyramid scheme from the beginning. Full disclosure: In 1985, at age thirty-four, I applied for an emerging-arts grant from the Jerome Foundation through Franklin Furnace. The panel that awarded the grant was made up of performance people, many in their twenties, who dismissed my application on the basis that I had worked with Andy Warhol in the 1960s as a teenaged Warhol Superstar. No mention was made of the fact that I had just

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After years of publicly criticizing the emerging arts model within the performance world, I am interested to find that there now seems to be a growing interest in discussing the effects of what this focus on emerging arts has done to mid- and late-career artists. This conversation is starting to happen, no doubt, because those very generations of emerging artists who received funding and were focused upon when they were in their twenties and thirties—who benefited from emerging arts money and attention—before having the opportunity to age into power, now find themselves having aged out of that system.

Whatever it takes, it is time for this conversation to happen in the American arts. It is also time for what I call “the developmental arc” in the arts to be discussed, to give encouragement and faith to younger artists by letting them know that—as is the case with every other type of work—skill and ability greatly are great aids art-making, and that making art is one of the few things in life that one learns to improve at with age. Sadly, this is not true of football, baseball, boxing, or marathon running, but it is absolutely true about making art.

I could not afford the price of approval when I was “young,” which demanded the pretzeling of my spirit and my writing into a shape that was approval-worthy by the gatekeepers. When you are “old,” or over fifty, approval in itself has no value. Only authenticity, individuality, and originality have lasting value. My mantra has been: The only success that matters is artistic success. After thirty or forty years, it is not a question of potential or even of talent; you either did the work or you didn’t. In the end, it is a matter of not losing your nerve.

PENNY ARCADE (aka Susana Ventura) is a text-based theatre- and performance-maker based in New York City. She debuted at eighteen in John Vaccaro’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous and was an Andy Warhol superstar featured in the filmWomen In Revolt. She is also a poet and essayist. Since 1999, the video project she co-helms with long-time collaborator Steve Zehentner, The Lower East Side Biography Project, has broadcast and streamed weekly: www.facebook.com/thelowereastsidebiographyproject.

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