Today CAN brings you "Cultural Tourism vs. Cultural Exchange," an essay by Bau Graves reflecting on two years of international cultural exchange by Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music. In 2007-2009, the school sent 36 performing artists to nine countries, where Old Town School faculty offered workshops in American vernacular music and dance styles, performed in foreign schools and concert facilities, met and collaborated with foreign musicians, and forged a series of relationships with organizations that now form the basis of a nascent international network. The experience caused Graves to interrogate the ethics of cultural exchange. "Artists who have the good fortune to spend extended periods abroad, or to host visiting artists to our country," he writes, "find the deepest satisfaction in these reciprocal relationships. But such reciprocity rests on an assumption of equity among participants. The extreme disparities of income and status between many artists from North America or Europe and their counterparts in the global South intrude into this relationship." The essay is accompanied by a brief downloadable report on the two years of exchanges.

CAN writer John Sullivan has an article in a professional health policy journal about community artists, neighborhood residents and researchers working on public health collaborations. The essay, in New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental & Occupational Health Policy, is titled "Popular Arts and Education in Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR): On the Subtle Craft of Developing and Enhancing Channels for Clear Conversations among CBPR Partners." Sullivan is a public-health educator and theater director; he co-wrote it with health-policy expert C. Eduardo Siqueira. CBPR, say the authors, is a methodology hinged on flexible power relationships and unobstructed flow of expert and local knowledge among project partners. They discuss popular arts and education techniques that "have increasingly taken center stage as culturally fluent, bidirectional modalities for conveying information, building responsive channels for communication, promoting policy, and enhancing the effectiveness of grassroots organizing."

Rabbi David Bauer has joined Liz Lerman Dance Exchange as the first-ever Rabbinic Fellow in Residence. Rabbi Bauer will take classes with the dance company and plans to learn about creating rituals and telling stories in dance and movement within communities. His work with the Dance Exchange will examine ways to fuse movement and theater with Torah study and Jewish worship. Rabbi Bauer, who comes to the Dance Exchange from the Jewish Community of Amherst, Mass., has also been a director of theater and opera and an activist in the field of queer spirituality. Based on the Dance Exchange’s long experience teaching and creating in Jewish settings, this pilot program is intended to explore the value of direct exchange between a practicing rabbi and an inquiry-driven dance company. Bauer is writing a blog reflecting on his experiences.

Times are hard, says MOMA's Agnes Gund in the Huffington Post (2/4/10), but two recent studies reveal that a bad situation is even worse for performing and visual artists. Gund quotes NEA and LINC studies showing that artists' incomes were down 50-60 percent last year. She makes the case for jobs for artists and reviews the history of the 1930s WPA , when 40,000 artists were hired across the U.S. Gund recalls President Obama's 2008 campaign, which supported "the creation of an 'Artists Corps' of young artists trained to work in low-income schools and their communities," now being studied by the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. She suggests "we demonstrate our appreciation for [artists] as citizens, as contributors to democracy, as purveyors of knowledge, expression and aspiration, and as builders of our infrastructure." (Thanks, Arlene Goldbard.)

A coda to our item yesterday about the L.A. City Council's decision not to end guaranteed funding for the Department of Cultural Affairs: An angel appeared at the hearing. Among the many arts supporters flooding the council chambers was artist Lilia Ramirez, who came clad in a white gown and huge, white angel wings as "a homage to the city of L.A." and told council members that "art saved me. I was in the streets, I wasn't doing so good. ... Here I am today, giving love and light to everyone." The community is still concerned about possible cuts to individual programs. And, according to Mike Boehm in the L.A. Times (2/4/10), the council did authorize staff members to pursue seeking private, nonprofit partners to take over running many of the city's community arts centers.

CAN has added to its Places To Study database the M.A., M.F.A. & Ph.D. in Performance as Public Practice (PPP) from the University of Texas at Austin. The PPP program “explores the widest possible parameters of performance in its relationship to historical and contemporary global culture as well as to local communities.” The M.A., M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees are 36, 60 and 72-credits, respectively. All three programs have a flexible, individualized curriculum, and share three required courses that introduce students to research methods, pedagogy and the field. Students design the majority of their coursework and practical experiences, which could include studying Augusto Boal and working with Theatre Action Project. The PPP’s Web site states, “Your interests in practice can be integrated into your coursework; we encourage you to keep practice a part of your life while you study.”

The editor of a new textbook on the university and democratic societies is looking for chapter proposals on how the arts and arts communities work with colleges and universities to pursue citizenship education. “Citizenship, Democracy and the University: Theory and Practice in Europe and North America” will examine the role and methods of higher education in preparing citizens for meaningful participation in democracies. This interdisciplinary English-language text is being developed for use within graduate and professional degree programs whose graduates will be tasked with building, strengthening and maintaining the institutions and ideals underpinning democratic societies. Additionally, text editors hope it will be a useful reference for leaders and policy makers. The deadline for authors to submit chapter proposals is March 1, 2010. Contact Jason Laker, Queen's University, Canada, at jason.laker@queensu.ca.

On February 2, 2010, the Obama Administration released FY 2011 budget request to Congress which includes cuts to the NEA, NEH, IMLS and the Department of Education's Arts in Education program. Americans for the Arts President & CEO Robert Lynch noted in a press statement (2/1/10), "The Administration's FY 2011 budget request of $161.3 million for the National Endowment for the Arts--while just a fraction of the $6.3 billion of direct expenditures for all arts nonprofits in the United States--is unfortunately a $6 million decrease from what Congress appropriated for FY 2010. Also, the consolidation of the Arts in Education (AIE) program within the Department of Education's new 'Effective Teaching and Learning for Well-Rounded Education' category puts us at unease and could lead to a diminished focus on arts education." Go to AftA's Arts Action Center online to find leads on what to do to advocate for change in the budget.