American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA) is an American entertainment union representing performers in variety entertainment, including circuses, Las Vegas showrooms and cabarets, comedy showcases, dance revues, magic shows, theme park shows, and arena and auditorium extravaganzas. It awards the "Georgie Award" (after George M. Cohan) for variety performer of the year. There is some overlap between the jurisdictions of AGVA and Actors' Equity.
AGVA was the successor to the American Federation of Actors organized by Sophie Tucker and others in the late 1930s, and affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. In 1939 the AFL dissolved the AFA due to financial irregularities, and issued a new charter to AGVA (although some members went to Equity instead).
When actress Penny Singleton (who had been active in supporting the 1967 strike of the AGVA-represented Rockettes against Radio City Music Hall), was elected president of AGVA in 1969, she became the first woman to be president of an AFL-CIO union. The current Executive President is poet, songwriter, composer, and singer Rod McKuen, who has held the post for the past 19 years.
Its offices are in New York and Los Angeles.
Famous quotes containing the words american, variety and/or artists:
“[If] Playboy’s Hugh Hefner has done nothing else for American culture, he has given it two of the great lies of the twentieth century: “I buy it for the fiction” and “I buy it for the interview.””
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)
“His reversed body gracefully curved, his brown legs hoisted like a Tarentine sail, his joined ankles tacking, Van gripped with splayed hands the brow of gravity, and moved to and fro, veering and sidestepping, opening his mouth the wrong way, and blinking in the odd bilboquet fashion peculiar to eyelids in his abnormal position. Even more extraordinary than the variety and velocity of the movements he made in imitation of animal hind legs was the effortlessness of his stance.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
—Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)