Hotel Bruce

Sure, it’s unfortunate that so many arts/music collectives start out with lofty ideas only to fall off the map into the abyss of anonymity. As a former co-partner in several (now defunct) local art/music collectives, I can even point to the usual causes—lack of money or lack of dedication on the part of the members of the collective or both. What is an arts collective? Typically, it’s a small group of artists unified by a common purpose that may include sharing a work space, and an esprit de corps that leads to collaboration in performance, dance, painting, etc.

Because so many fail, I went in search of a local arts collective that has shown sustainable and visible success to find out what made them tick.

My research led me first to SAFMOD, short for Sub Atomic Frequency Modulation OverDose, an arts collective currently managed by core trio Young Park, Neil Chastain and Ezra Houser. Park provides choreography and dance, Chastain produces music and Houser is a poet and stilt-dancer as well as managing director.

The collective has worked with a long list of guest artists from other genres, including visual artists Ron Crutch and Alexandra Underhill (a member for many years) and Sano, the graffiti artist who designed costumes and backdrops for about five years. SAFMOD is a multi-media performance group that has shown surprising staying power. And yet after ten years in the business, it only applied for nonprofit status last year—so, what gives?

It’s one of those sickeningly hot July afternoons and we’re riding in a minivan without A/C in search of Nelson’s Ledges. Behind the wheel, Young Park appears barely concerned that the road map is failing. In fact, she’s handling the fact that we’re completely lost quite well—driving, talking, directing questions of her own to me as Ezra relaxes as best as he can in the backseat.

YP: Actually, SAFMOD was started in Ann Arbor [by] me and Neil while we were going to the University of Michigan. We ended up taking a class where the whole point was to bring dancers, musicians and artists together to collaborate on a piece. That was our first collaboration, and we continued to work together, mostly in an improvisational way, and have different artists work with us.
Neil was commuting back and forth; he was in (Cleveland-based rock band) Craw, and I was meeting artists from the Cleveland institutes of art and music. When we graduated, Cleveland seemed like a good place to continue our work because the city was very affordable. There were lots of studio spaces for rehearsal, and the venues were much more accessible than in a place like New York.

YP: I'm not really sure if our method is any better or worse than anyone else’s. We’ve been in existence for ten years, and just last year we have become a nonprofit organization. So for ten years we worked like a rock band, where we would get gigs, and there was money from the gigs that we would use for paying performers and travel expenses.

We didn’t get any funding from corporations or foundations. But we were really focused on creative development—in the sense that we experimented with every combination of music, sound, movement, and visual art that we could think of. That really helped in the first decade. We were refining the performance and the artistic aspect, but the organizational structure of things just didn’t exist.
Now that Ezra is our managing director, what we’re finding in going to foundations for money is that they don’t really care what you do artistically. They want to see that your organization is sound as a business model.

HB: They want to see a fiscal history that’s successful before they give money. Did you document that kind of information before going for non-profit status?

YP: We have been documenting our history for the last three years, and our fiscal history is pretty good.

HB: One of my groups incorporated right away into a non-profit, so we had no fiscal history. Foundations wouldn’t give any money to us because of that.

YP: I think it’s also really important to have a clear mission statement. With your mission statement, you need to be clear that the group of people working together is all in agreement with its content. Your mission statement should encompass what you’re doing. That’s something that foundations look at also. What you’re saying is what you’re doing. Lucky for us, we have a very broad mission statement, which is something like, “SAFMOD is dedicated to”... ahh... help! managing director! What’s our mission statement?

EH: It’s three parts: collaboration and experimentation with diverse artists towards developing and presenting original work.

HB: How did you avoid organizational pitfalls—did you get professional help like a board or advisers and a lawyer to help you apply for non-profit status?

YP: We have a board which we are working on expanding, and we got an Ohio Arts Council grant to hire a consultant. She is helping with board development as well as other organizational things. She gives us a lot of warnings and gives us pros and cons to having a large board, a small board, a strong board, a weak board. We do have a lawyer who has been helping us with [obtaining] non-profit status, and he did it pro bono.

EH: Performing at a pagan festival, dancing on rocks, putting down rugs for dancers who are up on stilts after 2 a.m. over a 60-foot bonfire...
That’s the thing about SAFMOD is the stories—you just look around and see these situations.

And just to describe the situation—it’s an old abandoned schoolhouse at 3 a.m., you have inner city African-American hip hop dudes, some people spinning on their heads, dancers standing in body-tight unitards with other guys painting airbrush designs on their costumes, a whole bunch of Puerto Ricans over here helping to weave these different costumes and fabrics together. It’s a mixture of so many things, and SAFMOD is sitting in the new millennium that way. Young people are comfortable sharing difference. It’s an entity that’s dedicated to difference and to bringing that diversity together to make a cohesive whole.