Organizations in Profile
voices. I thought it was successful, but it wasn't a poetry reading. When I came back to the States, I got into video in the mid-80s and put on an evening-length performance, 'Tom Mulready Within and Without Television,' with twelve TV monitors, a computer on stage, and a live band. I talked to myself on the TVs, and we collected one word per person admission, then the audience picked the words out of a hat and spoke them into a mike, while I wrote a poem in real time on the computer. If you had good eyesight, you could watch on the TVs. It was always called 'The Most Avant-Garde Poem in the World, Ever/ because it was written right in front of the audience. These shows went over well and I had invited a number of people from the arts community in Cleveland, and James Levin from Cleveland Public Theatre not only showed up and liked it; he asked me to do something at his theatre. This was late 1987, and we presented our first Performance Art Festival in Spring of 1988. Q. - How did The Cleveland Performance Art Festival come into being? Thomas - The first couple of years we were a projects of Cleveland Public Theatre (CPT) and used their non-profit status and they allocated some budget money for us - $3000 the first year. We put a panel together and invited everyone we knew who did performance art, mostly from the region. We didn't curate the first year, we simply scheduled performances, and the panelists all performed on the final night. There was tremendous electricity in the air for the first Festival, and it was standing room only, since CPT only had about 50 seats at the time. So I learned that the key to standing room only is to have fewer chairs. After the excitement and media attention of the first year, it was easy to raise money for a second Festival, in fact one sponsor, an insurance company headquartered in Cleveland, Progressive Insurance, gave us $20,000, no questions asked, and that allowed us to bring in Karen Finley and Paul Zaloom (from New York) and Zygmunt Pio Trowski (from Poland). Q - How did the festival operate - were you a limited company? A non-profit organization? Thomas - After a couple of years, the PAF was becoming a bigger and bigger portion of CPT s budget, with a lot of funding raised and earmarked for the PAF. It was also gaining in notoriety and infamy, especially after the Annie Sprinkle incident in 1990. And it was definitely not theatre, so the mission of CPT was being challenged with so much emphasis on performance art. So James and I met on the shores of Lake Erie and decided to spin the Festival off into its own non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. Then we called on all the funders and basically asked them to start funding two separate organizations when they had only funded one in the past, and they have been doing so ever since. However, if the funding climate had not been so supportive in the late 80s and early 90s (this was before the big NEA cuts), we might not have been able to grow on our own. 121