African American Legends; Voza Rivers, New Heritage Theatre Group

The African-American legend series highlights the accomplishments of blacks and areas as various politics, sports, aviation, business, drama, literature and art. We will explore how African-Americans have succeeded in areas where they do in previous years, clearly because of segregation, racism and lack of opportunity. I'm your host, Dr. Roscoe C. Brown, Jr., and with us today is Rosa Roberts, the executive producer of the New Heritage Theatre, readings, Rosa, and greetings to you also and to your viewers. Okay, you are an artistic entrepreneur. Tell us what's happening in the Hall and Moss community at this present time. Well, the other hat that I wear is I'm the chairman of the Hall of March Alliance, and it's a 400 plus cultural service organization. We meet the first Monday of every month at the Theatre Riverside Church, and at that meeting

over 250 of our members attend, what that means for me is that we hear issues, challenges, success stories of what is happening in the community. What we have done is October, starting October 1st, through the 7th, we have claimed it, art, Harlem, arts, advocacy, week, where we're going to take on some of these issues that are impacting on the arts, everything from politics, of course, with the elections and the City Council with term limits, possibly the cuts in funding, the housing crisis in our communities, and most importantly, now the collapse of the financial institutions who've been helpful to the arts. So that's one area of concern for what we call the arts practitioners, how we're going to survive in this new environment.

Now, you're going to discuss it. Yes. Now, hopefully, you get some solutions, because those issues that you talked about, politics if financial communities support, they're no simple answers, it's a very complex process. But what this really is is an awareness-raising situation, getting people to understand what's going on. For example, you said politics, there are two levels of politics. One is using arts to express political positions, and the other is using politics to get more funding for the arts. That's right. How's it going to focus on our vote? I think it really has to be both, in this instance, for example, City Council, there are 51 City Council members, there are 39 of them leaving this year, next year. We, a lot of our arts institutions get discretionary funding through elected officials. The Department of Cultural Affairs is a city agency, and they're due to have major cuts

just like the New York State Council of the Arts. So it is to help through our electoral process, meaning our elected officials, what the discretionary dollars, who could kind of make up for what those cuts are going to be. And without the arts organizations having an awareness and an understanding of that process, it puts them at a disadvantage, because the more sophisticated we make our arts institutions and our artists, the better able they can position themselves for creating strategies that will keep them in the game. Well, to you is making a good case for what people call pork. They say that this discretionary funding goes beyond the legislative process. Ideally, the legislative process should provide adequate money for arts and creative activities.

At the same time, there's competition for education and for healthcare and housing. Now, how do you make the case that arts deserve an equal role with education, housing, and healthcare when you're advocating for more support for the arts? I think the issue of arts being elevated to the same level of priorities and communities of color and communities in the city is a very tough case. It's a tough case, it's a needed and necessary objective to have parity with housing and unemployment, education, however, in terms of the dispersal of those dollars, the powers that be have put arts at the bottom wrong. And they put it at the bottom wrong, but it doesn't mean that they don't have to pay attention to it because through every strand of what we consider our priorities, arts is that ingredient,

that mix that makes all of it work. And so, a community without its arts, a people without its arts and culture, we could become a lost community, Harlem and the holloms of the world. The arts have really played a major part in sharing our culture, breaking down barriers of misunderstanding. There is this camaraderie that takes place through the arts. And sometimes we can't do it over other issues, but the arts can break down those barriers. And so, it's really an important tool. Well, actually, arts can be used to help increase awareness about health care issues, but education issues. And the final analysis of arts is about quality of life. Yes. It's just like the programs to eliminate graffiti from walls and trains and so on, that is a quality of life issue.

Yes. And eventually, when people see that you really are concerned about their quality of life, they will perform better. They will be a little bit more aggressive and take care of their children, take care of the community, picking up their trash. So there is a question of quality of life. But then the question is, what clout does the autistic community have with the political and the corporate community in raising these funds? Well, when we look at the communities throughout the city, most of the small arts institutions, their major priority is how do we sustain, how do we keep our doors open, how do we continue to do what we do? The effort to change the dynamic to include a focus on coming together as a collective, so that in numbers this strength to articulate what these concerns are is real key. But by and large, our history as artists has been that we work on our own individual institutions

or initiatives. And I think one of the most important challenges for us now to address the issues of what's happening with the economy is that the arts organizations must work together. And that's what a core group of us have been doing over the last several years is to do collaborations. And some instances, a funder will say, you have a really great project. We can only give you X number of dollars. The organization has X and it needs another pot, and it is now our direction that two arts organizations come together, two theater companies, two dance companies. And then let's leverage our individual resources. But as a collaborative, we can share in the graphic designers. We can share in the postage that goes out there, other ways that we can come together

to leverage our resources. And this is something that takes a minute to develop because we've been so accustomed to working alone. Now, when you talk about art, you're talking about theater. Are you talking about it? Performing individual arts. You're talking about dance, you're talking about the visual arts as well. Yes, we are. We are our membership of the Harlem Arts Alliance and there are other cultural service organizations, and we really cover all of the arts, so the media arts also, which deals with the videos, the filmmakers directed the technicians, choreographers, all the behind the scene personnel. It's top to bottom, performing in visual and media arts all combined. Well, how do you get those organizations to work together because a dance organization working with a media organization, working with a theater organization, might have a little

strain? Well, when we look at the creation of a work, a body of work, let's say that someone's interested in doing a piece by Zora Neale Hurston that she had written as a play. And there is a group, a dance company, that is a member of our organization. So we have a theater company who wants to do a play, we have a dance company, we would put them together and say, can you collaborate and create choreography for this play that we're doing? And then we could also extend it to one of our musical composers to underscore music. So when you start, you could start out as a straight production, a straight play, but because we're all sitting at the table and everyone says, oh, you're going to do a Zora Neale Hurston piece, this is very interesting. You know, our dance company has been studying her body of work and can we collaborate? We look for those opportunities and it's only done by example.

And I think you're going to see more of it. And I know that I've been at the forefront of doing those kind of collaborations for many years. This is my 44th year producing and believe me, I could not do it without the collaborations. Talking about productions, you talked about funding and the politicians and the banks and so on. What about audience? What do you do about audience development? What about the audiences in the city, in the Harlem community, in the bed sties, the bronzes of the world? What do you do about audience development? Because that really is a key because when I'm a banker and you come into me and said, well, what's your audience? If the audience is 100, that's one thing, but the audience is 5,000, that's another. What do you do about audience development? I think each venue has, each venue has its own particular characteristics. There are theater companies that know that they can't get audiences of more than 100 people. And there are institutions that will fund that initiative.

And it's the responsibility of that producing entity to make sure that if they do four, five performances a week at 100, and that means the total capacity is 500, that they shoot to get 70, 80% of that audience for that particular week. There are other institutions that are larger and funders want to look at that institution and not interested in the smaller institution because they're interested in having their brand, their logo to reach a wider audience as possible. And they're now going to look at institutions who can meet those objectives. So there's a different scale of audience participation. But what's central to all of it is that the producing entity must have a core audience and they have to sustain that audience with creative ways. For my example is that the majority of the events that I do are free.

Okay, this complementary admission. So people come in, I could be at a 500 seat theater, it's complementary, but it's not free. What we do is that we ask for an offering based on the fact that we know that once you see what we do, as opposed to getting that $20, that would be a normal admission, a person may say, oh my God, I can't believe that I saw this, I'll write a check for $100. Someone else who can't afford it, they just can't afford it, it might be a donation when they walk out of three or four dollars. But when you leverage it out, what we've found is that we've done better, but most importantly we've exposed an audience at the maximum level because then it's standing room only for every event that we do. And so we've cultivated an audience not only in one institution but all of them, so we'll go and play the 100 seaters as well as the 2000 seaters and fill up every institution

that we are, that we perform in. I know that Rosa Rivers puts on great productions, but how would I, or a member of the audience, find out about these other organizations, is a newspaper, is it on a flyer? How do you find out? Because public relations is a major part of getting an audience. I agree and that's why I want to go back to the core groups. We have a lot of small institutions and they, with their meager funding, a lot of them concentrate on programmatic issues as opposed to audience development and marketing. So you will not find in the local papers ads about what they're doing because they don't have the budget to do that. That means they have to go back to the old system of word of mouth advertising, passing out flyers at different events and also using the internet.

And some are very successful at the internet aspect, so they feel, oh my god, let's reach our core audience by going to the internet to do that. And that's a new way that they are also maintaining their audiences, but if you're talking about the other kinds of ways, which is advertising, a lot of us, meaning the real small groups aren't able to advertise. What about critical reviews of their work? There are papers in the African American, other communities that do many reviews of art shows, dance concerts, and so how does that work? In most of the ethnic publications, there's only one person that can do the reviews. And right now, knowing that kind of information, if there are four ethnic publications and there are over 300 organizations that are doing events and activities, it's extremely difficult.

And most of the ethnic publications have a very, very small staff to deal with arts and culture because the advertisers, where they make their money, are in the other sections and not in arts and culture. So arts and culture is necessary component of the index of a paper, however, it's always the smallest section and when you look at all of the other sections or whatever. You have this coordinating council. Yes. Couldn't the coordinating council work out a way of having one major page where they indicate that what's going on in the community? Well, we have, we are in negotiations now to do exactly what you've described. In fact, the first arts supplement will come out next month October and we have another art supplement coming out in November and we are involved with a magazine to do the same.

So yes, we are taking on that issue. But right now, if you ask me about it today, it doesn't exist, but we definitely are working on an arts calendar that various papers will print. Now, suppose I'm on the audience, this is excited about this. How would they get in touch with the Harlem Council, the Harlem Arts Alliance? The phone number is two, one, two, four, one, zero, zero, zero, three, zero, extension, two, one, two. The website is www.hollumAA.org and we have a very active calendar that's on our website so that you could go months by month and also get information about a lot of the group sitter in our community. It's not only Harlem, Harlem is a central location, but our members come from all over the city, but our primary focus when we start it was to galvanize the arts community

in Harlem. Okay, we've been talking about the business aspect, the fundraising aspect, the political aspect. Let's talk about the content aspect. Yes. What are the main themes in African-American theater art and drama at this point in time? I think that there's always a role for retrospectives and historical figures. Right now, there is a drama with music at the National Black Theater based on the life of Hattie McDaniel's, the first African-American to win an Oscar for her role in going with the win, and it's a wonderful production that gives us the historical environment that existed back then and what she went through, which is a story that you don't hear. I know that last year Woody King in the National, the new federal theater, did a series of pieces.

We did something on step and fetch it. We did a Zora Neale Hurston piece, and again, those are those kind of historical figures and retrospectives. There are revivals that theaters are doing, and there's a whole body of new emerging work. So we see emerging work by established and new writers, and these writing programs, the Franks of Verra's Writers Program, the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center. These are writing programs in every week they read new scripts. For me, I would say I would receive about 50 scripts a year to consider for reading series that I do at the Museum of the City of New York once a month. It's, people are really quite creative, musicals are a little harder because it costs much more to do, and in that regard, I see more of the established groups doing the

musicals, but there is no dearth of good material to feed the pipeline for that year. That's true, and this is true in theater generally. retrospectives and revivals tend to attract people. Yes, what about plays and musicals and dramas that tackle the major social problems of today, back in the 60s and 70s and early 80s, black theater was really about challenging the establishment about what's happening, what should be happening. Now we have more plays that deal with psychic things or introspective things with families and so on. Maybe not challenging the system as much as we used to in art. Because the difference between the 60s and 70s and even the 80s and now is that we're in a mediated society, we're protesting in information, there are other vehicles now for doing it, and so with the diminishing funds that a lot of the theaters have and

where they're fighting for audiences, audiences are so mediated about issues that now when they come into a space, they want to be entertained, they want to be distracted, they don't want to be hit over the head. When we were in the 60s, we were energized in the 70s and we wanted to tear down the system. Right now there's a survival mode and there's a need to escape. And so there is an interesting way to balance that and what happens is because I was toying with the idea of I had a very successful production called Sarafina and it dealt with apartheid and young kids and I said, should I bring that back because everyone's saying those are, it's been almost 20 years and there's a new generation and they want to see something like that.

So they can be energized and I'm really struggling with what I know, what it costs to do and where that audience is now, it's a different audience. My audience is different now. So they have all of these things I have to do focusing on it with a group of people to find out before I just jump in and do it. Well this is the classical dilemma of the arts going back hundreds of years, arts being in the entertainment for the rich, the opiate of the masses as against arts opening the door for the masses to challenge their establishment. And we've seen this in the media in general, it would seem that part of this is age related. Yes. There are many of us came up in those days where we were challenging and now we're looking at other things and we're making history at the same time and we need to energize the young people. What are you doing? Going down to energize some of these younger writers, dances, musicians, etc. Well I am very pleased to say that New Heritage Theatre Group, which is the oldest black

knot for profit theater in New York City and I'm a co-founding member. We're 44 years old that Jamal Joseph and I 10 years ago created a youth division and we created something called impact repertory theater, our young people are activists. We combine activism with artists and they have taken on all sorts of the political issues that exist today and they have created original material and song and dance and theatrical performances. They now are armed with high definition cameras and they've created videos. We were selected this year for an Oscar for best song in a film. We performed on the Oscars which was shown in 200 countries, a billion people saw these young kids from Harlem.

That's another step I feel that if I step down today I know that the foundation is already late. The young people who were with us 10 years ago who were 12 and 13, they're running the program. We do 60 to 70 shows a year. They are one of the most requested performing groups and they are taking on issues that are intergenerational. They're taking on politics, they're taking on teen pregnancy, suicide, they're taking on unemployment, housing issues but they do it in such a creative way and the material is always intergenerational. Now suppose someone in the audience wants to get this group to participate or perform for them. Yes. How do they do that? It's Impact Repertory Theater, they're based in Harlem, the phone number is 212-926-4516, Deetris Bolden, B-O-L-D-E-N is the coordinator.

She was with us 10 years ago and now she runs the program and we're very, very happy with that program and we doubt that is an example of what a lot of our cultural institutions have been around, where's the legacy, where who's following us and where do you start, when do you start sharing the history because I don't want to forget. I don't want the benefits of the struggles of our grandparents and great grandparents to be forgotten. Our culture is not disposable and this kind of mediated society where a lot of our young people are living off of sound bites, where when we go into a room to have a conversation as opposed to looking me in the eye, they're looking down because they have their hand held devices and they're texting people somewhere else and that's that lack of attention that I feel is disrespectful but they feel that this is what they need to do.

Well that's your purpose and today on African American Legends we've been talking about Bose of Rivers, the Executive Director of the New Heritage Theatre and the coordinator of the Harlem Arts Alliance. Thanks for being with us today. Thank you Roscoe.