Is Commercial a Dirty Word: Interrogating Ethics, Hierarchies, and Unspoken Tensions of Producing

At SIPAM, producers and cultural leaders from five continents challenged the hierarchies surrounding arts funding and asked whether the real problem is commerce, or a sector that still mistrusts popularity, profit and its own audiences.

Can theatre afford moral purity when the systems that sustain it are collapsing? The question hovered over Is Commercial a Dirty Word?, a SIPAM panel that brought together producers, artistic directors and funding specialists working across the United States, Romania, Australia, the Middle East and Latin America. 

The panel brought together Beth Boone, Artistic & Executive Director of Miami Light Project; Olga Garay-English, international arts consultant and Co-Director of NLTI; Stuart Every, Creative Director of Dolphin Creative; Britt Plummer, Director & Creative Producer of FRANK. Theatre; Tiberiu Mercurian, Director of Undercloud Independent Theatre Festival and Co-Founder of Grivița 53; Chris Simion, Producer of Undercloud Independent Theatre Festival and Co-Founder of Grivița 53; Alicia Adams, Founder of URUCUM Global Arts; and Deb Wilks, Co-Founder & Director of Cluster Arts, in a conversation moderated by Richard Jordan, international artistic producer and columnist for The Stage.

In one country, “commercial” describes a legal and producing structure. In another, it signals artistic compromise. Elsewhere, it is simply the only possible way to work. A foundation may represent private wealth in the United States and a nonprofit organisation in Europe or Latin America. A successful show may subsidise an institution for decades, yet popularity itself can make an artist appear less worthy of public support. Across these differences, the panel returned repeatedly to a shared reality: art needs money, but the source, scale and language of that money continue to shape which work gets made and who is allowed to survive.

Jordan opened by acknowledging the tension built into the title. “‘Commercial’ is used as praise by some and criticism by others,” he said. “But perhaps one of the biggest problems is that people use the same word differently.”

Alicia Adams, founder of URUCUM Global Arts and formerly vice president for international programming and dance at the Kennedy Center, began with the American definition of a nonprofit. Such an organisation does not generate profit for individuals; revenue is reinvested in the institution. Yet nonprofit status does not prevent commercial activity from taking place inside it.

“Commercial, to me, is generating revenue,” Adams said. That apparently simple definition immediately complicated the opposition between mission and money.

Olga Garay-English, an international arts consultant and co-director of the National Latinx Theater Initiative, noted how culturally specific the nonprofit model remains. During her time at Miami-Dade County’s Department of Cultural Affairs, she often met people who assumed that creating a nonprofit meant they could not be paid. “That is exactly wrong,” she said. In the United States, nonprofit status provides a structure through which individuals and foundations can support cultural organisations and receive tax benefits. In Romania, by contrast, the overwhelming presence of state-supported theatres has produced a very different institutional imagination.

For Beth Boone, artistic and executive director of Miami Light Project, the most urgent issue was no longer how the American nonprofit system works, but whether it can continue to work at all.

“I think it is important to note that the not-for-profit model is broken, and our system is in collapse right now,” Boone said. “Not to be a bummer, but it is a fact.”

Miami Light Project commissions, produces and presents contemporary dance, music, theatre and multimedia work, while developing projects with Miami-based artists. Boone described it as a medium-sized, independent and “somewhat scrappy” organisation. Unlike larger institutions housed in buildings paid for by public authorities, organisations at this scale are confronting an existential threat.

“There is a wholesale divestment of the meagre government support that has historically been invested in our organisations,” she said. Foundations are changing their priorities at the same time, leaving cultural organisations under pressure to pursue private donors or increase ticket prices. Neither option is neutral. “It is a complete rethinking of the way in which you relate to community.”

Boone had no easy replacement for the system being dismantled. “I am out on the road looking for answers right now,” she said. “I do not think commercial is a dirty word. I just do not think it is the only word.” Miami Light Project is focused primarily on artists and on resourcing risk-taking, thought-provoking ideas that may never become popular. Adversity can generate creativity, she acknowledged, but it also forces institutional leaders to keep organisations alive while simultaneously creating new work.

“The system that we were brought up in, the system that we were told is the system to be part of, is in collapse,” Boone said. “We are trying to figure out how to build a new one all at once.”

The Romanian perspective offered a striking counterpoint. Tiberiu Mercurian, director of the Undercloud Independent Theatre Festival and co-founder of Grivița 53 with Chris Simion, came to culture after a career in marketing rather than through the state theatre system.

“I never worked in a state theatre, so I do not know how it is to be 100 percent subsidised,” he said. “I am coming from the business community, and therefore I think my attitude is totally different. If I want to do something, I have to finance it myself and I have to find ways to finance it.”

For Mercurian, the first question behind any artistic project is direct: who is financing the performance? Grivița 53 began ten years ago with the knowledge that it would not receive the millions of euros required to build a new theatre. Its team turned instead to partners, sponsors, private donors and cultural fundraising campaigns. The result, he said, is a privately financed investment of EUR 4.5 million in two new performance spaces in Bucharest.

“I do not think that we sold our soul,” Mercurian said. “We did what we found correct. I think it is about attitude and perspective.”

He illustrated that approach with 5 + 3 = 9, a production presented at FITS in which the cast wore Adidas clothing because the scenographer liked the brand. The team approached the company and reframed an existing artistic choice as product placement. “We went to Adidas and said, ‘This is product placement, so you have to support us.’ I think this is the way you can introduce brands and commercials into artistic life.”

The American model has always relied more heavily on philanthropy, individual donors and corporate partners than most European systems. Adams said organisations are now exploring every possible source because support for the nonprofit world has contracted so sharply. Boone, however, stressed that sponsorship is never evenly available. Corporate money tends to favour a particular scale, audience and kind of work.

“If you are working at the edge, pushing the edges from a content perspective, it does not really fit into a realm,” she said. “Coca-Cola is not going to sponsor what I do.”

For Britt Plummer, director and creative producer of FRANK. Theatre sponsorship is already essential to running the Courtyard of Curiosities during Adelaide Fringe. The curated venue operates in heritage spaces that must be temporarily fitted with lighting, curtains and technical infrastructure. A technology sponsor provides that equipment in return for logo visibility.

“Without that sponsorship deal, we would not be able to exist,” Plummer said.

Her venue champions South Australian and interstate artists alongside international work, with an emphasis on clowning, theatre and alternative comedy. Yet it must compete with large Fringe venues capable of seating thousands and programming television comedians or major circus productions at higher ticket prices. Plummer described the Courtyard as “the fringe of the fringe”: a home for riskier work trying to remain visible amid the scale and noise of the wider festival.

Commercialisation may be inevitable within fringe ecosystems, she suggested, but curation can still give artists a recognisable platform and draw both audiences and programmers towards work they might otherwise miss. The fragility of that labour surfaced in one of the discussion’s shortest and most revealing exchanges. Asked how the venue balances experimental programming with the need to pay its bills, Plummer answered: “That is why I work so many jobs, right?”

The romance of independence looked very different from the inside. It often meant that the person protecting artistic risk absorbed the unpaid or underpaid labour required to keep it possible.

Plummer was equally clear that survival did not erase ethical limits. Some major donors in the Australian festival circuit hold political positions with which she strongly disagrees. “I will not take their money. I will find somebody else,” she said. “I really love the freedom with our programming, that I am not answering to anybody.” Even if a donation could transform the venue, she added, there are contexts in which she would still refuse it and search for another route.

Adams used the Kennedy Center to show how commercial and nonprofit activity can intersect inside one institution. Opera, orchestral music, dance and other disciplines generally lose money. Broadway productions can generate the income that helps offset those losses. Commercial producers may also provide “enhancement” funding to develop work within a nonprofit theatre before a potential Broadway transfer. “There are so many ways in which the commercial and the nonprofit world intersect,” Adams said.

She recalled a moment when Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, itself a nonprofit organisation, was considered “too commercial” for public support because it could generate income. “Sometimes commercial means successful, sometimes it means popular, and sometimes it means you are not going to get the money if you are a nonprofit.”

Garay-English cautioned against turning the model of a major institution into a universal solution. European theatres may generate meaningful ancillary income from their bars, while that practice is far less common in the United States. More importantly, she said, “What works for the Kennedy Center and attracts sponsors to the Kennedy Center is not going to work for Miami Light Project. We have to be careful not to overgeneralise.”

Deb Wilks, co-founder and director of Cluster Arts, described another kind of commercial structure. The Australian for-profit organisation generates 87 percent of its income from fees and receives only limited state funding. Its mission is to help circus, physical theatre and contemporary dance artists become more sustainable, including through budgeting, marketing and long-term international strategy.

“We watched artists be very good at making work, but really bad at running a business,” Wilks said. Cluster Arts therefore builds three-year strategies with artists and companies, defining where they want to go and which markets can realistically support that journey.

Investment, however, has become “almost impossible” to secure, particularly for circus and physical theatre, which can be commercially attractive or artistically experimental but do not always fit investors’ expectations. Wilks described a First Nations project intended for Karratha, where funding from a mining company created an ethical problem. Rather than refusing immediately, the visiting First Nations artists met with the traditional owners of the land. Together, they negotiated a solution and agreed to accept the funding.

“It might depend sometimes on how we approach it as well,” Wilks said. Her example did not dissolve the politics of extractive money, but it showed that ethical decisions can be collective and negotiated rather than imposed from outside the affected communities.

Cluster Arts also spreads risk across time. A production may use Edinburgh Fringe as one stage in a longer route towards other UK venues, allowing more time to attract investors, build relationships and let presenters encounter the work. In this model, a fringe appearance is not a self-contained gamble but part of an international strategy.

Stuart Every, creative director of Dolphin Creative, reversed one of the panel’s dominant assumptions. While many participants began with the artist and searched for ways to resource the work, Every began with the audience.

“I am not aligned with artists. I am aligned to audiences,” he said. “Obviously artists are crucial, but when I am working, I am looking to see what the audience wants.” He identifies an audience first, then scouts work at festivals and markets that might connect with it.

In the Middle East, he argued, there are no conventional arts grants to apply for. A producer must ask who has the money to make a project happen: a government, a shopping mall or another commercial partner. Every has converted vacant shops and mall atriums into venues, importing techniques and artists encountered in Edinburgh and Adelaide.

The absence of an established theatre-going identity can itself create possibility. “The hardest thing about producing in the regions is that they have no idea what theatre is,” Every said. “And the best thing is that they have no idea what theatre is, because then you can reinvent it for them.” An audience may first encounter a performance in an ice rink or a shopping mall rather than a conventional theatre.

His Dubai Street Festival grew from eight artists and around twenty shows to fifty artists and an audience of 300,000 before it closed prior to the pandemic. That growth came largely through word of mouth, in markets where the promotional channels familiar to European producers were not always available.

The discussion of Latin America produced another hybrid. Garay-English described the Santiago a Mil International Festival as one of the strongest performing arts festivals in the region. Its nonprofit structure combines a major mining sponsor, government grants and international partnerships. The sponsor creates an obvious ethical tension, she said, because mining is both economically powerful and socially and environmentally damaging. At the same time, the festival pays artists’ fees, hotels, production costs and marketing, while visiting companies secure their own international travel, often with support from their home countries.

The model demonstrates how subsidies in one country can become the condition of international mobility in another. It also shows that supposedly distinct systems are already deeply interdependent.

Consolidation adds another pressure. Jordan pointed to theatre-owning conglomerates and first-look agreements that give a producer priority over potential transfers from a theatre’s programme. Such arrangements may bring resources, but they can also narrow the space available to independent producers.

In Australia, Wilks said, the situation is different because many large venues are state-owned. Yet shrinking budgets make them increasingly reluctant to take risks. She had assembled seven venues for a South African production and needed ten to make the tour viable. Once indicative costs were circulated, four withdrew before negotiations had properly begun. The company will now use Adelaide Fringe as an entry point into Australia and attempt to rebuild the route from there.

Garay-English added that financial models can collapse because of forces far beyond artistic or commercial planning. Rising visa costs and denials in the United States threaten international tours and the agencies built around them. If even one or two musicians in an ensemble are refused entry, an entire circuit can become unviable.

Adams recalled the immense difficulty of bringing Cuban artists to the United States for a multidisciplinary festival after a change of administration closed the US Embassy in Havana. Artists had to travel to Mexico for visa appointments before returning to Cuba and then travelling to the United States. The process dramatically increased costs, but the organisers continued because of the project’s artistic vision.

That vision, Adams suggested, may be a more useful distinction than legal status alone. Nonprofit work is often described as “mission-driven,” while commercial work is positioned as its opposite. Yet large, accessible productions can introduce new audiences to an art form and build the cultural ecology on which more experimental work depends.

Jordan proposed a final reframing: perhaps commercial theatre is not a dirty word but “an invisible handshake,” an invitation extended to someone who has never considered themselves a theatre person. A pantomime, musical, circus or clowning show can become the first step towards another kind of performance. The boundaries separating commercial and nonprofit work may be far more porous than the institutions policing them.

The closing reflections shifted from diagnosis to hope. Boone wished for political leaders and regimes hostile to freedom of speech and creativity to fall so artists could do their work. Garay-English called for the collaborative values articulated during the pandemic to be restored in practice, with presenters sharing rather than guarding projects and relationships. Every urged the sector to recognise the audience again and guide new spectators gradually towards unfamiliar work. “We need to almost sell theatre to audiences again,” he said. “We have presumed that the audiences are there and they will just come to a show.”

Wilks chose one word: curiosity. “We continue to be curious about each other, and that brings us together,” she said. “Finding out what other people are doing, how they are doing it, talking to each other, working together.”

Adams hoped the Kennedy Center would return as a vital local, national and international part of the cultural ecosystem, while recognising that smaller Washington institutions had gained audiences and opportunities as displaced artists moved into their spaces.

Plummer did not want independent work simply to imitate commercial scale. Its intimacy is part of its value: a one-to-one performance, a fifty-seat clowning show or an encounter that could never exist in a major venue in the same form. “I hope that we can continue to cut through the noise with the resources that we have,” she said. “There is work that audiences do not know they need to see.”

The more urgent question, then, may not be whether commercial is a dirty word. It is whether the performing arts can stop using the word to divide an ecosystem whose parts already depend on one another, and begin building structures in which artists can take risks, audiences can enter from many directions, and success does not have to be treated as a betrayal.