FROM TRIAGE TO TRIO
Two dynamic arts groups find space to grow at the Center for Contemporary Arts
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.” So wrote Tom Stoppard in his brilliant play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in which each entrance of his title characters corresponds to an exit of theirs in Hamlet.
The same is true for Chatter, the chamber music group from Albuquerque that’s been offering Saturday-morning concerts at SITE Santa Fe since January 2018. On its recent exodus from the Railyard, Chatter has been joined by the Exodus Ensemble as both groups move to the Center for Contemporary Arts, providing an infusion of activity and potential ticket sales after CCA’S recent near-death experience.
With any luck, they’ll be there for quite a while. Chatter has a threeyear agreement with CCA to manage and conduct programming in the Muñoz Waxman Gallery and Spector Ripps Gallery, which adjoin each other in CCA’S secondary space. The main activities will be weekly Chatter concerts (up from once a month in Santa Fe when they began), many Exodus Ensemble rehearsals and performances, and a visual arts program that is still in development.
While this is good news for Chatter and Exodus, it’s great news for CCA, continuing a remarkable turnaround from April 6, when it announced an immediate closure. Despite a strong film program, the organization’s finances had long been weighed down by the galleries, which were expensive to program and operate and generated relatively little income.
“More than 900 people have donated to us since we reopened as a cinema-focused organization,” says Board Chair David Muck. “We’ve raised almost $400,000 to date,” he says, adding, “and we know that more than 90% of the donors were cinema patrons.” CCA’S partnership with Chatter and the Exodus Ensemble turns the galleries into a cash-positive venture, which means that the future fundraising load to sustain CCA will be significantly lower than it has been in recent years.
Muck and his board colleagues considered several different reopening options, including some in which a newly created nonprofit would take
“WE ALIGN WITH CHATTER IN LOTS OF WAYS, EVEN THOUGH WE’RE IN DIFFERENT FORMS. WE’RE ALL EXPERIMENTING WITH DIFFERENT THINGS.”
— EXODUS ENSEMBLE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR APRIL CLEVELAND
over its operations. The Chatter proposal was clearly the best option, they felt, as it adds two producing organizations with strong artistic profiles and contemporary orientations to the center’s programming mix. Chatter’s management and fiscal strengths were also a plus. “It’s a very well-organized and well-run operation,” Muck says, “and they’re financially very sound.”
One Simple Word: No
How has Chatter been able to quadruple its Santa Fe performances despite the pandemic’s impact on concert attendance? Much of its success has come from ignoring just about every standard practice of classical music organizations. Phone number? No. Subscription program? No. Season brochure? No. Program book or at least program notes? No and no. Donor perquisites? No. Full-time staff? No.
Performances in the afternoon or evening? Well, a few but mostly no. Repertory announced far in advance of concert dates? No — just six or eight weeks is typical. Ticket prices aimed at extracting every last dollar from patrons’ pockets? No. (For five years the advance price has been just $16. Recently, however, Chatter bit the bullet and increased it — to $16.50.)
Artistic Director David Felberg credits Chatter’s success to slow and organic growth (“We’ve never taken any drastic measures that I can recall; everything has been stepwise,” he says) and from consistently following a programming model it inherited from a predecessor Albuquerque organization called The Church of Beethoven — classical music plus a spoken-word segment by a local author or poet and a two-minute celebration of silence.
“From the beginning, Chatter has been all about accessibility,” Felberg says. “The concerts are only an hour long, and they’re on Saturday mornings in Santa Fe and Sunday mornings in Albuquerque. They’re easy to get to, you don’t have to dress up or anything like that, you can just go with whatever you’re wearing and enjoy it.” They even include free coffee, a not inconsiderable fringe benefit these days.
For Chatter’s musicians, there’s an obvious financial benefit from the increased number of performances, but there’s an important intangible as well. “There’s nothing like a performance to tell you what you need to focus on,” he says. “You can rehearse several times, but it’s not until the performance whether you know something’s going to work. So many times we’re thinking afterwards, ‘Gosh, I wish we could do that again.’ Now we can!”
Less Wandering in the High Desert
The 12-member Exodus Ensemble arrived from Chicago in September 2020, bringing a visceral, often-immersive live theater experience to Santa Fe. The group has led a peripatetic existence since then, living and performing in a variety of private homes and other venues throughout the city. Now a major change is in store.
Co-founding ensemble member Kya Brickhouse says, “We think about half to two-thirds of our performances will be at CCA, plus a whole lot of rehearsing. Every show we do could work there. But we want to perform at other spaces as well, in part to have two shows running simultaneously, and because we’ve developed these
great relationships with so many different spaces and organizations and people across Santa Fe.”
Site-specific stagings are a particular hallmark of the ensemble — Ivanov, its adaptation of an early Anton Chekhov play, will continue to be performed in homes, and Zero, an adaptation of Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, is being developed for a performance run at the Vladem Contemporary when it opens this fall.
“Going to CCA is very cool for us,” says Artistic Director April Cleveland, “because we need at least 40 hours a week somewhere to do our work, and it’s hard to find affordable space that has that kind of availability in Santa Fe. Plus, we align with Chatter in lots of ways, even though we’re in different forms. We’re all experimenting with different things.”
Brickhouse is excited to have a fixed space, saying it makes the group more of a Santa Fe fixture and that it marks a step in its maturity. “We have a headquarters now! A place to come back to when we tour,” she says. Exodus recently performed outside the 505 area code for the first time, in New York, and plans for a San Francisco engagement are in the works.
It’s also a sign of the group’s increasing management skills. “We’re all performers who weren’t trained to run a company,” Cleveland says. “To be able to stand in a room and describe a mission and a vision and get people excited is something they don’t teach you as an actor or director.”
While Chatter, Exodus, and CCA will definitely be the major benefactors of the new arrangement, other Santa Fe nonprofits will, too, on a smaller scale. “In our agreement, CCA reserved the right to host one event each month for other groups,” Muck says, “so we can help them with their fundraising as well.”
Above: Exodus Ensemble co-founding member Kya Brickhouse (left) performed the role of Medea in the group’s 2022 production of Jayson. April Cleveland (right) is Exodus Ensemble’s artistic director.