#arts-funding-cuts

#arts-funding-cuts

Since Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in 1938, it is said that not a day has passed when the Pulitzer prize-winning show hasn't been performed. Every time I read it, I come away with the feeling of having been woken up, says Michael Sheen, star of the upcoming touring production of Wilder's play about a close-knit community in small-town America. With this urgent sense of I have to not waste this.'

Aside from the nationally famous amphibian who cavorted in front of the ICE facility in South Portland, though, our theaters were alight with the passion and profound insights brought to us by an array of directors, actors, musicians and designers. Not only has their work sparked conversation and mirrored the pain and joy of being human - in general and specifically in 2025 - these artists offered us something we all crave: delight and entertainment.

You'll find most professional dancers in the studio teaching, not onstage performing - because paid performing work has always been scarce, and keeps getting scarcer. And with President Trump's policies gutting arts funding and devaluing cultural work at every turn, the squeeze on dance artists is getting even tighter. So these highly skilled artists do what actually pays: They pour everything they know (and it's a lot; 15-50 years and more of intensive dance and fitness training) into the next generation in studios across America.

Lauren Woods launched the project in May after growing frustrated with what she saw as some publishers' focus on sensationalism and the lack of bookstores focused on local authors in the area. "I had friends who wrote award-winning books and couldn't get their books into D.C. bookstores because they were smaller presses, or they didn't have a mass appeal, or the book buyer didn't think they would be profitable," Woods said. "And that always seemed wrong to me."

In May, the World Arts West Dance lost a $60,000 National Endowment of the Arts grant, part of the millions of dollars of funding cut from the NEA that forms part of the generational assault on the endowment summed up by the Cato Institute in April: "The NEA's modest grant budget substitutes individuals' preferences for those of committees, crowding out private provision, politicizing art, and violating freedom of conscience."