Eight radical ways to change arts funding

A few years after I first started working in theatre, I worked under a director who used this phrase that I love. When he was trying to uncover something about a moment, get at what the character was doing, he would say something like, “So what’s actually actually happening is…”

I love this turn of phrase, actually actually, because I think it speaks to the layers of honesty with which we communicate. There’s a way in which we might say we’re doing something but actually actually we’re kind of doing something else. Like when I say that I’m working all day on a grant but actually actually I’m equal parts answering grant questions and distracting myself with games on my phone or reading emails that I don’t really need to look at. It’s not malicious, this uncovering of my real activities but it does show the ways in which we label our actions in ways that aren’t always inclusive of all the forces working on us.

Actually actually is a manifestation of our actions in the most literal and concrete sense. It strips them of their highfalutin’ intentions and gets down to the nitty-gritty of their real intents and their actual (actual) effects. It shows that our motives are often more complex and human than their purest descriptions.

Sometimes I wish I could ask arts funders to tell me what they actually actually want.

In my anecdotal experience, when people give away large amounts of money there’s what they say they want in their beautifully crafted guidelines and then there are the means by which these funds are dispersed. And a lot of the time, what funders say they want isn’t actually actually best engendered by the processes through which their funds are dispersed.

I don’t, truly, honestly, think this is malice, but I know there are times it can actually feel that way. That said, I think it’s useful for us to remind ourselves of the difference between what is said and what we feel like we actually actually hear. It keeps you sane. It keeps things in perspective. It allows you not to get caught up in rage when you feel like you are held to a standard that’s not always what is shown on the surface.

This isn’t true across all my experience, and it certainly exists at a lot of different levels. The one that most gets me though, the one I find the most often frustrating, is the call for “innovative” art. Innovation is a tricky work. It is grounded deeply in risk. It requires, by definition, newness and the encountering of the unknown. It is something encountered for the first time. All of which is very hard to explain in a clear and delineated narrative six months, a year, two years before the innovative thing is going to take place, before its component pieces are thoroughly explored and identified, before its map has been charted, before experiments have been conducted to test hypotheses. By the time these kinds of things are known, the actual innovation is already over.

One can ask an artist to articulate the questions they use to court the unknown, or one can ask them to provide a steadfast plan that is carried out without alteration. One can encourage them to scientifically journey into unfamiliar experimentation or one can seek out practiced and previously defined skills. These are both interesting and potentially worthy things. But in actual actuality they are a nonoverlapping Venn diagram.

I understand the desire to know things, I do. But you can’t have it both ways, my darlings. Or rather, you can, in a way, if you pretend it’s possible and leave it to those actually executing the thing to try their damnedest to pull those two circles toward a tiny space of intersection. It’s a lot of work, that pulling, work that I’d say is better served elsewhere, like actually actually implementing some innovation.