Essay: Jacob Niedzwiecki on the future of artists and arts organizations, Part III

@JackMoves

“Build no more fortresses, build railways.” Part III
by Jacob Niedzwiecki
(reprinted with permission)
Performance photos by Vish Hansa, featuring the cast of Jacqueries, Part 1

We hang together, or we hang separately
I’m at a point in my career where I’m getting asked more and more frequently, “Are you incorporated?” As I see it, I have been lucky enough to avoid that fate. As a young artist, I watched several creators go through that process only to emerge with an incredibly cumbersome organizational armature that actually made it harder for them to make work. Since leaving the National Ballet in 2007, I have fiercely defended my independence and my creative initiative. But I also can’t overlook the way that my relationships with established companies (large and small) have made my independent career possible.

Essay: Jacob Niedzwiecki on the future of artists and arts organizations, Part II

@JakeMoves

“Build no more fortresses, build railways.” Part II

by Jacob Niedzwiecki
(reprinted with permission)
Performance photos by Vish Hansa, featuring the cast of Jacqueries, Part 1

Live performance is now a premium product — or even more of one
We’re putting on live performances in the age of mechanical reproduction. When 'free' is the default price point, even a fringe show becomes a premium product. For indie organizations and companies that run close to their communities, this is only a small bump up the ladder. But organizations who were offering a premium product are now offering an elite product. They need a strategy to avoid creating a price umbrella. They need an affordable on-ramp for aspirational consumers and potential audience members. And they need to pay time and attention to social issues to keep their image positive. Cheap, high-reach activities like livestreams can help all types of organizations. Large organizations can use second companies or chamber groups as ‘flanker brands’, with the potential to negotiate contracts more amenable to reaching extramural audiences.

Essay: Jacob Niedzwiecki on the future of artists and arts organizations, Part I

“Build no more fortresses, build railways.” Part I
by Jacob Niedzwiecki
(reprinted with permission)
Performance photos by Vish Hansa, featuring the cast of Jacqueries, Part 1

@JakeMoves

I’m a choreographer, director, and coder. In the last seven years, my creative work has reached a live audience of maybe 15,000 people. In the same period, I’ve reached over 150,000 people through works for screen (directing the recent World Ballet Day livestream for the National Ballet of Canada, music videos, and other online videos, and film festivals). So if I want to reach the widest audience possible, I should focus on works for online audiences, right?

No. Online audiences don’t generally like to pay for things, and there are no arts councils in cyberspace. (Corporate sponsorship sometimes fills in, but it usually follows success rather than enabling it).

 I’ve reached ten times more people through online and film works, but earned less than a tenth of the compensation for that work. 

These comments about earnings don’t come from a place of greed, but a place of accessibility. When I was twelve, I read Arnold Haskell’s midcentury primer on ballet, which advised that it was unwise to attempt a life as a ballet dancer without wealthy parents or a rich husband. Given my hippie parents and my penchant for bohemian/artist types, I was lucky that in the intervening half-century, dancers had organized and made ballet a viable profession. When it’s impossible to earn a living from creative endeavours, artistic creation becomes an elite pastime. Online creators have struggled with this sustainability question since the dawn of the Internet, and only recently have platforms like Kickstarter and Patreon begun to help.

Sunday Feature: Interview with Jacob Niedzwiecki (Jacqueries)

Fusing
Jacob Niedzwiecki dances to the pulse of today and the future with no fear of interesting failure
by Beat Rice

Jacob Niedzwiecki is a choreographer, filmmaker, and creative technologist whose work fuses movement, media, and code into innovative new forms. He trained as a classical and contemporary dancer and performed for several years with the National Ballet of Canada. His stage works include commissions from the TorQ Percussion Quartet and Chung-Ang Arts University in Seoul. His dance films have been shown online and at festivals around the world; his most recent short film Who By Fire (premiered in February 2013 at the Dance On Camera Film Festival at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. This summer he has a new performance piece entitled Jacqueries. Charpo's Beat Rice sat down with him to learn more about his new performance endeavour.

CHARPO: Jacqueries is a piece you are working on that does not fall into any conventional performance genre. How would you sum it up?

NIEDZWIECKI: Jacqueries is a live promenade performance that works in tandem with a custom iPhone app. It is being presented by F/, which is run by myself Valerie Calam and Luke Garwood. The goal of F/ is to ingrate new media and dance. We ask what can dance look like and what can the audience experience be like here in the present.

CHARPO: Where are you and your team with the project currently?

NIEDZWIECKI: We are finishing up our creation period and getting into run-throughs. We’ve established all of our locations, found the best places for each of these scenes to live, and now we’re figuring out how to get people between them in interesting ways and how to handle all the co-ordination of the passing off of groups of people between performers, and handing off all of this information to our sound designer, John Gzowski.