Cleveland Performance Art Festival closes.

Cleveland's 12-year-old Performance Art Festival (PAF), once a flourishing arts gathering, is no more. On April 16-25, 1999, the Cleveland Public Theater hosted its final annual festival, The Last Performance Art Festival. Since its founding in 1987, the festival (the largest of its kind in the country) has presented more than 1000 performance artists from several countries, including such controversial and important artists as Karen Finley, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, Rachel Rosenthal, Annie Sprinkle, Linda Montano, Ping Chong and Seiji Shimoda. The PAF was rare in its vehement stance on freedom of expression.

The festival began with a budget of a few thousand dollars and peaked at $100,000 in the mid-1990s. The Ohio Arts Council (OAC), enthusiastic about the idea of an interdisciplinary performance festival that combined visual arts and dance, was a contributor from the beginning. The Cleveland Public Theater made the PAF a part of its programming budget in 1987, providing the additional support needed to launch the new festival. The next year, the Progressive Corporation provided about $20,000 in support. At the same time, the OAC began funding proposals in a new "interdisciplinary" category under which the PAF received about half of the allotted money for the next five years. As support grew, the festival was able to host internationally known artists and the PAF was able to form a 501(c)(3) organization separate from the Cleveland Public Theater. By the late 1980s, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was contributing about: $15,000 per year to the PAF. This trend continued into the mid-1990s as the NEA and other state and local entities contributed support to fund the festival at their highest levels. In 1996, however, NEA funding was discontinued for the PAR Between the 1998 and 1999 festivals, the OAC changed its guidelines so that it was no longer possible to apply for both presenting and operating assistance. These events were both factors in the festival's ultimate demise. Founding Director Thomas Mulready is quick to insist that the PAF always broke even, an impressive feat given "the risk we incurred with the type of art we were presenting. We managed that risk well. . . . We did not lose money and we were never in a situation where we had to stop doing what we were doing." But the decision to end the festival came from a realistic awareness that the climate for arts funding from both public and private sources has become increasingly conservative.

The decrease in funding damaged the festival in terms of staff as well - the event became a great deal of work for little monetary compensation. Mulready says that often in nonprofit organizations such as this one, the staff members already have full-time jobs and other responsibilities in addition to the festival's workload. "It's amazing we lasted 12 years before it took its toll. . . . Eventually the ends don't meet and you burn yourself out." Mulready stepped down as director in 1997 but continued as president of the Board. Robert Thurmer assumed the directorship in 1998, but resigned after just one year.

Rather than just disappear, the Board wanted to present one final festival equal in caliber and professionalism to those of previous years. This year's nine-day event was organized and co-produced by Michael Herbst, director of Fourth World, a non-profit organization dedicated to presenting the work of emerging contemporary, interdisciplinary artists in Cleveland and New York City which had been involved in the PAF for several years. According to Mulready, there were probably' more individual contributions this year than ever in the festival's history. In addition, support came from such stalwart sources as the OAC, the George Gund Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation as well as from WENZ-FM, Powderkeg Contemporary Performance and other corporations and foundations. Attendance was high, and there was a great deal of media attention as the event inspired a dialog within the community about the lack of funding in the United States for arts organizations. Mulready said this year's event called attention to the problems "not just for avant-garde art, but for mainstream art and arts education as well."

T. A. KINSEY is an experimental filmmaker and Assist:ant Professor of Film at the University of Toledo in Toledo, OH.