San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival Needs Donations
Dear Artists,
As
I am sure you know, this is a very difficult time for all arts
organizations financially, and World Arts West has been no different in
our struggle to find the funding necessary to produce the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival. Although we continue to have strong audience attendance at Festival
performances, ticket income is just a portion of our revenue stream,
and we have continued to see support from government, foundations, and
corporate funders drop.
Facing financial challenges resulting from this continuing drop in support, we have had to lay off staff members and will not be able to hold auditions for the 2012 San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival in January 2012. Instead, Festival Artistic Directors CK Ladzekpo and Carlos Carvajal will be curating, or selecting artists, for next year's Festival line-up from groups that participated in past Festivals.
I
want to assure you that we do not intend to continue in this mode, and
we are planning to return to the audition process for the 2013 Festival.
We have a confirmed reservation to hold the next auditions on January
12th/13th and 19th/20th, 2013, at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley.
Given
current financial realities, we need to reduce expenses as much as
possible in order to weather this difficult financial chapter and secure
the Festival's future. Again, we come to this difficult
decision having already made cutbacks in all other areas possible,
including significant staff reductions, and other reductions in
overhead.
By
placing auditions on hiatus for a year, we hope to be able to navigate
the new financial realities and make the best decisions we can regarding
the Festival's future.
We are doing our best to raise funds and ask that you share any leads for possible Festival
donors with us. Also, it would help us if you would write a letter or
send an email about the value of both the auditions and the Festival to you and the community. We will then use these letters to help garner new financial support.
You can contact me directly at julie@worldartswest.org or mail letters to: World Arts West, Fort Mason Center, Building D, San Francisco, CA 94123.
This
will be unhappy news for many of you, but I am hopeful that if we work
together through this difficult time, we will emerge with a stronger Festival, and a stronger dance community.
