So you want to know more about PRO?
Currently, I run PRO from my home office and work with a fantastic and growing rag-tag team of freelancers. However, PRO is more than just a group of people selling their services – PRO is a holistic way of thinking about business for the arts – a new attitude that encompasses both a respect for the non-commercial process of creating work and a hit-the-ground-running realism about competitive business needs in the 21st century. At A.O. PRO(+ductions), we don’t just want to finish the job and have that be that – we want to educate our arts community about how to be better businesspeople and make more future-savvy and informed choices. We think that you can be an art maker and a businessperson, and we’d like to work with you to show you how. We’d like to give you a hand so you can focus on your artistic work, but we’d also love you to emerge from it a smarter working artist.
In this way, PRO is in dialogue with the community-focused part of the A.O. family – the Urgent Artist blog and community – and we hope to eventually offer classes and workshops to the public. Additionally, PRO is closely tied in to the A.O. Movement Collective. Here’s how the system works:
When clients come to us with work, we’ll figure out an affordable price for the work they want done; one that’s fair both to them as clients and us as skilled freelancers. However, for many artists, prices that are great deals from the freelancer’s point of view (even when they’re as low as possible) are still too expensive. That’s where our barter system comes in – we’ll work with you to figure out what we can trade as part or all of the payment so that you can afford the work you need. Those bartered goods or services (for example, body work, dance training, administrative services, volunteering, or even a home cooked meal) are then put into a database for the A.O. Movement Collective to utilize. My dancers and I then have the opportunity to use those services as supplemental payment for our artistic work. In this way, even though I can’t pay my dancers for anything close to all the effort they put into the company, I can offset their work with bartered services that are of certain use to them. Additionally, due to this cross-pollination of artists, I’m networking artists with other artists and practitioners, introducing them to a broader range of clients through the joint umbrellas of PRO and the AOMC.
The system certainly still has some kinks to work out, and we’ll be using this first year as a time to test the program, for problem solving and trouble shooting. However, with all the talk we do about working towards sustainable dancemaking and our belief in the holistic business/arts union, we thought it was better to try something out than be eternally hypothesisizing.
If you’d like to talk more about the A.O. Family of programs, have questions or ideas about how they interact with the broader arts community, or would like to join the PRO team, I’d love to hear from you – just send me an email at AOPROinfo@gmail.com and we’ll set up a coffee date.
