ARTS BUDGET CUTS TALK WORRISOME

Robert Willoughby Jones, executive director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, worries that he will have to cut five to seven members from his chorus if President Reagan’s proposed budget cuts for the arts go through.

Bill Bushnell, artistic/producing director of the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre, can’t tell what he would do in the event of an overall 11.7% decrease for the National Endowment for the Arts: cut LAAT’s community-related services, such as senior citizen and student outreach programs, or raise ticket prices, which he says are probably too high already.

And in a week that saw the national arts leadership begin to raise a firestorm of protest over White House confirmation of the cuts, Rudy Perez, choreographer of the Rudy Perez Performance Ensemble, fears that his experimental dance troupe could simply go under.

“We’re just at this place where things are beginning to happen,” said Perez, who moved his troupe here six years ago from New York City, “and I hear this news, and I think we might fold.

“I’m a Depression baby,” added Perez, who has gotten almost a third of his $40,000 budget from NEA fellowship grants, while this year for the first time he garnered a one-to-one matching grant of $15,000 to do a music video piece. “It’s just discouraging to know that this has come about and that I might be back where I started--in Spanish Harlem.”

It’s not just the National Endowment for the Arts budget--with the dance grants program dipping 13.5%, music 15% and opera and musical theater 18%--that has the national arts community set to raise a furor in Congress. There is also the reported Administration proposal that would virtually eliminate mail discounts for nonprofit institutions--the exception being special mailings for the blind. That proposal, which would more than double the price of discount mailing beginning Oct. 1, 1985 (the start of fiscal 1986), would have particular impact on larger institutions.

“That would kill us,” said a Los Angeles Philharmonic spokeswoman. “We mail more than a million pieces a year--the Hollywood Bowl mailing, the celebrity mailing, and we have the Philharmonic winter-season mailing. . . . “

And waiting in the wings there is Treasury Secretary Donald Regan’s wide-ranging flat-tax program. It would limit deductions for charitable or nonprofit contributions to the amount over 2% of the donor’s adjusted gross income. Arts organization leaders fear that private and corporate giving would plummet.

“The effect would be murderous,” said Michael Newton, president of the Music Center Performing Arts Council. “They (the tax proposals) would reduce the incentives for charitable giving, not just for the arts, but for hospitals--everything. On the one hand the Administration talks about the private sector doing more. On the other hand they’re talking about undercutting the heart of the incentives for private-sector giving.”

Meanwhile, political observers as well as Washington lobbyists see renewed life for Regan’s flat-tax plan with all its ramifications now that Regan is scheduled to become White House chief of staff in the job trade with James A. Baker III.

“Add it all up,” said Ann Murphy, executive director of the American Arts Alliance, the national arts advocacy organization--”the $20-million cut for the National Endowment for the Arts (from the current $163.7 million to the proposed $144.5 million), in the same budget the cut in nonprofit mailings, and the Regan tax proposal--and you tell me who’s going to support the nonprofit arts in this country. It’s not one little thing; it’s the collectiveness of it all.”

While Murphy and others expect Congress--in particular, the House Appropriations interior subcommittee chaired by Rep. Sidney Yates (D-Ill.), a longtime arts advocate--to eventually get the national endowment cuts restored, she is concerned that even at $163.7 million the arts would suffer. “We’ve been trying to hold on now for three, four years. We’re like the poor relatives.”

The American Arts Alliance intends to press for $175 million for the national endowment at subcommittee hearings in March, Murphy said. Meanwhile, Administration spokesmen point out that their proposal is $600,000 more than what they proposed the year before and comes when concern about the national debt might even have wrought a decrease.

Since Reagan’s first year in office in 1981, when he proposed slashing the arts agency’s last Carter Administration budget almost in half--to $88 million--he has sought to reduce arts appropriations. Each year, however, Congress actually boosted the arts budget. Nevertheless, there is still concern in the arts community that anything can happen, given the country’s mood about the staggering national debt, projected at $210 billion for fiscal 1986.

As a result there seems to be a new militancy in the arts community.

“Why the arts “ as a target for budget cuts? asked Beverly Sills, general director of the New York City Opera, on the “CBS Morning News” Thursday. Saying she wouldn’t mind the cuts if the military budget suffered similar cuts, she asked: “Is beauty in your life less important than . . . arms?”

In the fiscal year which ended Sept. 30, 1984, California arts organizations and artists received nearly 600 grants totaling about $14 million--or nearly 10% of the total $148.9-million grants program. (The rest of the NEA budget for fiscal 1984, which totaled $162 million, is administrative.) Los Angeles County artists and organizations accounted for about 150 grants at $4 million. New York State, traditionally the largest recipient, drew 1,500 grants totaling $23 million.

Besides congressional action, about the only smidgen of comfort the California arts community could draw came from Sacramento on Jan. 8 when Gov. George Deukmejian recommended a $12,579,000 budget for the California Arts Council for fiscal 1986--a 12.3% increase over the current $11.2-million budget. Ironically, both figures include $887,000 in NEA funding for the state arts council. Arts advocates, however, still seek as a long-range goal more than $25 million--or $1 per capita--from the state budget alone.

As the largest supporter of the arts in the nation, the endowment is not only a focal point for the arts community but has become a symbol for government appreciation of the arts. Ironically, the budget wars loom while NEA prepares to commemorate its 20th anniversary with a yearlong celebration. Frank Hodsoll, chairman of the independent federal agency and who worked as a top aide to James Baker at the White House before assuming the endowment post, recently named Charlton Heston, a longtime friend of the Reagans, as chairman of the anniversary committee. In turn, Heston named Nancy Reagan honorary chairman.

Hodsoll could not be reached for comment about the proposed budget cuts.

Bella Lewitzky, speaking from Milwaukee where her dance group was touring this week, noted that when the government bailed out Chrysler, it said something important about the importance of the auto industry. “And when it starts cutting money, there is also an implied statement--not only to this country but abroad--that it does not care enough about our cultural health. . . . “

She added that what “makes it all so peculiar” is that the money the national endowment spends “does not reflect the actual effect of the NEA on companies like my company. The money amount, about $43,000, is about 6% of our budget, but for every dollar it spends, it levers for us close to $15.”

Pebbles Wadsworth, executive director of the UCLA Center for Fine Arts, noted the ripple effect the cuts will have. “As a major touring company, we rely on the NEA. It gives the (dance) companies money and us money to present them, so cutbacks would have a double jeopardy. A large organization like ours--we absolutely rely on the NEA to help support new artists and new art forms. Even when money doesn’t come directly to UCLA, we book companies and organizations that rely on the NEA . . . Rudy Perez’s dance ensemble. . . . “

On tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in New York, executive director Ernest Fleischmann at first twitted the Administration budget proposals. “A tiny teeny-weeny little (arts) agency which doesn’t make the slightest impact (on a budget deficit) to even a half-hour’s research into Star Wars technology should cause such. . . . “