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December 9, 2009

Joyce Theater Expands Its Studio Space
by Claudia La Rocco
December 4, 2009
The New York Times

The Joyce Theater Foundation has leased the former home of the defunct New Dance Group, marking a significant expansion at a time when many dance institutions are struggling to hold their ground.

Choreographers, always desperate for affordable, suitable space, will now have access to 11 studios at 305 West 38th Street for rehearsals, auditions, classes and workshops. The newly christened DANY Studios (the letters stand for Dance Art New York), which features storage and lounge areas, pianos and audio/video systems, will be available for rental daily, from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m., with certain hourly fees as low as $5. The lease runs through November 2016.

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Jacob's Pillow Executive Director Named One of Top 25 Most Powerful and Influential Arts Leaders

Ella Baff, Executive Director of Jacob's Pillow Dance, has been named one of the Top 25 Most Powerful and Influential Leaders in the Arts by Inside Arts. One of the few arts presenters and the only dance industry leader named, Baff is listed among fellow arts luminaries, including Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Robert Redford, actor and President of the Sundance Institute. Inside Arts is the official magazine of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.

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Capital Culture: Obama Drops Cautious Arts Policy
December 8, 2009
Associated Press

In his first year, President Barack Obama has marshaled the largest infusion of cultural funding in decades -- despite a few stumbles.

Though still far less than arts advocates contend is needed, they have high hopes this president could transform cultural policy, funding and arts education for years to come.

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Chairman Rocco Landesman Announces the First Round of FY2010 National Endowment for the Arts Grants
December 8, 2009

National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman is pleased to announce the first round of NEA FY2010 grants, which are the first grants awarded under his leadership. In total, the Arts Endowment will distribute $26,968,500 to support 1,207 projects nationwide through the following funding categories:
Access to Artistic Excellence, Creative Writing Fellowships in Prose, and Challenge America: Reaching Every Community Fast Track. In addition, the NEA's New Play Development Project will continue for another year.

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NEA Convenes Arts Service Organizations and NEA Discipline Directors to Discuss the NEA's 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts

Convening will be webcast live giving Americans the opportunity to watch this discussion of the future of arts participation

A live webcast of a roundtable discussion convened by NEA Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa will take place Thursday, December 10, 11:00am to 2:00pm (ET). The event brings together representatives of national arts service organizations and regional arts organizations with the NEA’s discipline directors to discuss the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the nation’s largest and most representative study of adults’ arts participation habits.

NOTE: Dance/USA staff will be present at the convening and will be analyzing the results of the survey. We will send our members highlights and helpful hints on how to share the findings of the survey with your board, community, and media. The survey will be available to the public as of December 10, 2009.

The survey was conducted in partnership with the United States Census Bureau and has been conducted five times since 1982. The conversation will focus on how these findings should inform the arts community’s work going forward, as well as how the survey should be expanded and refined in the future.

The live webcast will be available on the Art Works blog on the NEA website at www.arts.gov. No registration is required. An archive of the event will be available following the roundtable discussion.

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United States Artists to Announce 2009 USA Fellows

USA will announce the 50 artists selected as USA Fellows for 2009 next Monday, December 14. Hailing from 18 states and ranging in age from 28 to 82, these exceptional artists represent our nation’s vast diversity of cultural, ethnic, and geographic perspectives. Each winner receives a $50,000 grant.

This year, friends from coast to coast can follow the celebration streaming LIVE from Los Angeles at 7pm PST on December 14 at www.unitedstatesartists.org.

The evening will feature performances by USA Fellows past and present, and pay tribute to USA donors Eli and Edythe Broad for their leadership and generosity in the arts in Los Angeles and nationwide.

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A Survey Shows Pain of Recession for Artists
By Randy Kennedy
November 23, 2009
The New York Times

A major new survey of American artists and how they are weathering the economic downturn has found that slightly more than half experienced a drop in income from 2008 to 2009, a blow to an already struggling group, two thirds of whose members reported that they earned less than $40,000 last year.

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New Report Available on the Convergence of Five Trends that will Reshape the Social Sector

La Piana Consulting announces the release of a new report as part of its NonprofitNext initiative. The report, Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector, was funded by the James Irvine Foundation.

Read the new report, watch a video, or listen to a podcast.

The research identified five key trends converging to reshape the social sector. While each dynamic has profound implications for how nonprofits will do business in the future, it is their convergence that will transform the sector. These trends include:

  • Demographic Shifts Redefine Participation
  • Technological Advances Abound
  • Networks Enable Work to Be Organized in New Ways
  • Interest in Civic Engagement and Volunteerism Is Rising
  • Sector Boundaries Are Blurring

Each of the five major trends is changing the way the nonprofit sector operates.

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Year-End IRA Gifts Are Still Possible
December 2009
Guidestar

On December 31, 2009, an easy-to-get gift expires, so you've got two to three weeks to encourage your donors who are 71 and over to donate to you through their Individual Retirement Accounts, or IRAs.

It works like this. Those who are the right age (technically, 70½ and over) inform their traditional IRA administrators that they wish to make a "qualified charitable distribution" to your nonprofit. Your donor may have to fill out and fax back a simple form, and he or she will need your federal tax ID number and legal name. The administrator cuts the check and sends it directly to your office.

The advantage for you can be up to $100,000 from each donor. That's the maximum donation allowed per traditional IRA owner, per year.

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Charities Rise, Costing U.S. Billions in Tax Breaks
by Stephanie Strom
December 5, 2009
The New York Times

The number of organizations that can offer their donors a tax break in the name of charity has grown more than 60 percent in the United States, to 1.1 million, in just a decade.

Experts say nonprofits are skillfully exploiting the tax code’s broad and elastic definition of what constitutes such a charity, making it difficult for the Internal Revenue Service, which must bless them, to say no. The agency approved 99 percent of the applications for public charity status last year, according to a new study by students at Stanford University — or more than one every 10 to 15 minutes.

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Attracting Boys to Ballet Still a Challenge
by Janice Steinberg
November 29, 2009
The San Diego Union-Tribune

Think “ballet dancer,” and you’ll probably picture a pretty young woman in a tutu. The choreographer George Balanchine saw it that way. “Ballet is the female thing. It is woman,” he famously said.

Now think of the superstars of ballet, dancers who attained rock-star fame. Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev will leap — with dazzling height and power — into your mind.

For Steven Wistrich, director of City Ballet of San Diego, “When you see an incredible male dancer onstage like Baryshnikov, the girls might as well go home. They can’t hope to keep up with that level of excitement.”

Yet despite the athleticism of stars like Baryshnikov, ballet has been stereotyped as a girl thing in the United States. That’s made it hard to get American boys into ballet studios, with the result that many American companies are dominated by male dancers from outside the U.S. At American Ballet Theater, for example, six of the eight male principals are from other countries, as are all 11 principals at San Francisco Ballet.

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