Global and local arts charge the city

By Siobhan Peiffer and Julia Dahl

PHOTOS COURTESY INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF ARTS AND IDEAS Performers at the 1997 International Festival included, from left to right, dancer Bill T. Jones, the Shanghai Quartet, and singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie.

This question, for Collard, is "the enduring challenge of New Haven," one he must now face as the new director of New Haven's International Festival of Arts and Ideas. The annual Festival, which will run from Wed., Jun. 24 to Sun., Jun. 28 this year, celebrates artists from around the world as well as New Haven's copious local talent. Meanwhile, civic, business, and artistic leaders are working to resolve Collard's dilemma by promoting arts that bring community members together--and keeps them coming back for more.

This year's festival features diverse headliners, including the Royal National Theater of London, El Gran Combo of Puerto Rico, and Little Richard. The only event of its kind on the East Coast, the celebration brought 80,000 visitors, 575 artists, and $2.9 million of retail to the Elm City last summer--an impressive achievement, but somehow fitting for a city with the artistic resources of New Haven. With 15 premier performance spaces, 25 established dance, theater, and music groups, and more than 10 gallery spaces, "we have the appropriate venues and facilities," according to Michael Ross, managing director of Long Wharf Theater. "We have strong organizations. [The question is] how do we take them even further, appreciate them even more?"

Setting the stage

Collard outlined two ways in which the arts need to act: as economic spur and social unifier. While working in the United Kingdom, he prepared a report for the British government on the "role art can play in economic regeneration of cities." Collard explained, "City centers...construct a cultural core that works outwards." Seeking a "cultural core" is a trans-Atlantic trend: cities all over America and the U.K. are turning to the arts when confronted with the economic and civic problems of post-industrial depression. Charleston, South Carolina's Spoleto Festival and Scotland's Edinburgh Festival both successfully replaced urban blight with performance spaces and barren city blocks with large audiences.

"You can't pick up a newspaper without some community deciding that the arts are going to revitalize its economy," Collard said. Models like Charleston and Edinburgh inspired Ann Calabresi and Jean M. Handley, two local residents, to organize the first Festival in 1996, bringing Yale and SNET on board as founding sponsors. "What these people [in other cities] are fantasizing about, New Haven has," Collard said. "It has a cultural infrastructure."

In 1996, the Arts Council of Greater New Haven commissioned its own report to recommend how the city could better capitalize on this infrastructure and galvanize the area's $160 million cultural industry. Completed by the Wolf Foundation, a cultural planning consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass., the finished plan called for more arts facilities, more government investment in the arts, and more aggressive, coordinated marketing of arts events. "First and foremost," the plan explained, "we must marshal the people, institutions, resources, and creativity of the region." New Haven responded by forming a coordinating committee in January 1998. Chaired by Collard, the committee includes Linda Lorimer, LAW '77, secretary of the University, Frances Clark, executive director of the Arts Council, and Susan Whetstone, New Haven's chief administrative officer, as well as several local businessmen.

"It's the first time that there's been this level of institutional cooperation around the issue of arts and entertainment," Whetstone said. "It hasn't been left just to the Arts Council, it hasn't been left just to arts organizations." Lorimer concurred. "We are trying to link together various aspirations of arts groups in the region," she said. For arts administrators like Collard, this linking is good news. "If the festival is to serve the general cultural purpose," he said. "There has to be a general cultural purpose." Setting such a purpose is the committee's job.

Cultural Iceberg

One of the first steps in developing this agenda is tackling the problem of artistic homogeneity. As the Wolf Foundation observed, local arts "don't represent the diverse mix of races and ethnicities that comprise the greater New Haven area." Collard dubs the problem "the cultural iceberg." "The vast majority [of artistic life] is invisible," he said. "Most communities celebrate internally. The public bit tends to be a very white, WASPy culture, and that tends to be what's celebrated." Getting past the symphonies and Shakespeare to the offbeat means giving voice to local talent and to the 126 national cultures actively represented in the city. This year's Festival commissioned work specifically about a New Haven community (the winning piece, poet/performer Tracie Morris' series of monologues called "Grown Over Ivy," chronicles the African American experience at Yale) and sponsored artistic residencies in the city's neighborhoods.

Eventually, Collard hopes that residents can channel New Haven's diversity by developing a network of arts development offices in city neighborhoods. "Poorer communities have virtually no resources," he said. "Giving communities the resources to respond...that's a dramatic concept."

Colleen Coleman, a local visual artist, works to help the Dixwell neighborhood find these resources and use them. This year, residents from Dixwell and other areas will decorate portions of Orange Street during the Festival. "It's a good beginning," Coleman said. "A lot of what happens in neighborhoods by neighborhood people isn't always big press." As for the Dixwell project, she said, "We've only begun...I hope to get lots of input from lots of people who live in the area so they can really form a vision for their neighborhood." Coleman was a participant in the 1997 Festival also, but she's "a lot more hopeful" for this year's. "I like the fact that it's more community driven," she said.

Clark touts the Festival's local component as a means to resolve Collard's "mismatch between the cultural face and invisible culture." In 1996 and 1997, Clark ran "Art on the Edge," the International Festival's sub-festival of area artists. "Local artists want the stimulation" of international acts, Clark explained, "but they're sensitive about resources not being shared." This year, Art on the Edge has been assimilated into the main Festival, and an open audition call judged by neighborhood juries in Connecticut has filled three stages with homegrown talent. "There really needs to be much more in terms of making this a Festival that recognizes the arts and culture of the entire community. I think that developing ethnic festivals is a wonderful beginning," Clark said. "Whenever you start to do something new you take a risk.... Eventually you'll have the whole downtown filled with Festival activities."

Attracting the Affluent

Just as the Festival seeks to reach local audiences, it also needs to attract a returning core of outside visitors to be economically viable--the second part of Collard and the committees's revitalization. Connecticut's many suburbs are an obvious target, comprised of "an arts-interested audience: 35-plus and relatively affluent," Collard explained.

But New Haven lies in a competitive corridor: New York and Boston beckon with world-renowned cultural attractions. To make New Haven just as enticing, the Festival seeks "unique acts exploiting place," Collard said. For example, Yale's gothic courtyards give outsiders a chance to experience live music in a medieval cloister; the brick-lined avenue of Audubon Street lets couples dance to big-band jazz beneath the stars; the main stage on the Green provides an earthy setting for the rhythms of world-renowned drummers. Yale is especially crucial to these efforts. As Lorimer said, "Yale has opened the doors of the campus to the International Arts Festival and the walls as well." One planned concert in Beinecke library features the rare music of Yale's collection, the manuscripts of which will also be on exhibit during the show. "It's one of those experiences people would travel for," Collard said.

And if people travel to New Haven once and like what they see, they're likely to return, pumping more money and talent into the community. "If you're from the suburbs and take your kids down to the Green, or do music with a neighborhood music school," Clark said, "you'll say, `Can we come back during the year and take lessons here?'" The goal of arts coordinators is to showcase all the outstanding organizations New Haven has to offer.

365 Days a Year

Arts administrators hope the five-day Festival audience will expand to a year-round group of cultural consumers. "There has to be a synergy between the programming we present and the rest of the year," Collard explained. "We use venues to present work consistent with--but going beyond--what they do." For example, a festival presentation of international theatrical circus troupe Cirque Baroque at the Shubert Theater dovetails nicely with circus theater performances planned for the theater next season. The International Festival sparks interest in smaller summer celebrations as well: Fri., Jun. 26's concert of Irish music previews the Irish festival in nearby North Haven; and Festival publicity promotes Wooster Square's St. Andrew's celebration. International Festival-goers can return to New Haven for the SNET New Haven Jazz Festival--featuring Dizzy Gillespie--on Sat., Jul. 18, Sat., Jul. 25, and Sat., Aug. 1; the Celebrate New Haven Fourth Festival at Long Wharf park on Sat., Jul. 4 and Sun., Jul. 5; the New Haven Advocate Summertime Street Festival from Thurs., Aug. 20 to Sun., Aug. 23 on Chapel Street; and April's FilmFest New Haven.

And on the other end, area organizations can plan with these celebrations in mind. The International Festival "has gotten big organizations to think about ways they can develop programming that leads up to it," Clark said, "and more individual artists are thinking creatively about contributions they can make to this.... We'll continue to build into the Festival things that will make people come back." Nina Adams of FilmFest New Haven said that the film festival, once called the Sundance of the East, chose New Haven as its permanent venue because it is "sophisticated yet intimate...[and]...the city is improving in tone" as it continues to focus more heavily on the arts.

A member of the Arts Industry Council, Ross reports that "people are very encouraged about the upswing in [year-round] audiences." The Festival's net economic benefit leaped 89 percent from 1996 to '97; coordinators hope this year's Festival will see similar growth and that this growth will help stabilize the area's arts organizations--32 percent of which, according to the Wolf report, are operating at a budget deficit. "We need to make sure these organizations are financially viable in order to keep growing arts and culture," Ross said. One area the Committee considers imperative to securing the future of New Haven's many fringe arts organizations is aggressive marketing. By addressing the ways "people come to the arts and culture [including] parking, retail, and security," Ross envisions a plan wherein members of the community can "work together to promote arts and culture," coordinating individual publicity efforts into a city-wide strategy.

Civic Spirit

Giving voice to artistic diversity and promoting year-round economic viability remain the Festival's long-term goals. Yet everyone involved agrees that the Festival's vitality has "spin-off benefits," as Whetstone put it, which are harder to define: "bringing our community together and creating a sense of vitality within the center city." Clark agrees: "It gave the community a lift." In the Festival's first year, she remembered, most residents were surprised "that we pulled it off at all.... [Since then] we have made great strides in developing a sense of cohesion." This undeniable buzz of New Haven pride ranges from a bulletin board of "My Festival Moments" in the Festival office to spontaneous bragging at conference rooms in City Hall. As Whetstone put it, "the business community, the University, and the city have all joined together in recognition of the remarkable benefit arts has to all of our institutions."

For Collard and his International Festival, it's all about "making people believe art works." And making it work for New Haven.

Back to News...