While office space for performing-arts groups is plentiful, affordable theater and rehearsal space continues to be scarce.

Her father, formerly the general manager of the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia, is a consultant to performing-arts groups.

The most significant professional performing-arts group is the Coastal Symphony of Georgia, in existence since 1982, which stages productions each year at Glynn Academy's Memorial Auditorium.

This makes them more dependent on endowment income and grants and other private donations than other museums, performing-arts groups, or colleges and universities, they said.

Other performing-arts groups are already eyeing the space.

Her specialty, she said, is strategic planning and market research, tasks that entail setting goals for performing-arts groups and locating potential subscribers and supporters within a community.

Or will these groups and others like them go the way of the Sea Cliff Chamber Players, a pioneering regional performing-arts group founded in 1970?

But they also embody a link with their own people; to destroy them through the market mechanisms that threaten so many performing-arts groups in the West is to eliminate national institutions.

Republicans are proposing deep tax and budget cuts on both the state and Federal levels; if enacted, the cuts will threaten the viability of all performing-arts groups that depend on government subsidies.

The annual Parent Teacher Organization fund-raiser pays for various programs, including transportation for field trips, special in-class programs and visiting performing-arts groups.