Raising the curtain
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
By Ben Cannon
Jackson Hole, Wyo.-A dozen people peered into a dance studio in the Jackson Hole Center for the Arts last Wednesday as outside, cool temperatures brought a mid-June snowstorm to town.
In the room, a pair – a man and a woman, equally lithe – danced a celestial tangle of limbs that left the spectators in quiet awe. The two moved in time against a minimalist piece of acid-classical music.
“All I can think of is that they are like these rare exotic insects; they’re so beautiful,” observed Babs Case, who has spent her life in dance.
Case was describing the dancers, members of Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, a San Francisco contemporary ballet troupe widely considered among the nation’s premier dance companies.
Case directs Dancers’ Workshop, a group that teaches and performs locally and around Wyoming. The group is also a resident at the Center and brings in national touring groups to perform in Jackson Hole.
Despite Case’s and the other spectators’ admiration of the visiting dancers and their director and choreographer, King, the fact that not many people had purchased advance tickets to see the LINES Ballet perform last weekend troubled Case.
“I’m blown away by that,” she said. “We’ve only sold about 250 tickets.
“I just don’t think people get it,” Case added, seemingly preoccupied with frustration.
The troupe was scheduled to perform in the Center Theater, the Center’s main stage with a maximum capacity of 500. But only about half the seats in a venue widely acknowledged to have an intimate feel would be occupied for a troupe that in metropolitan areas regularly sells out multiple nights in much larger theaters.
With the ongoing emergence of and rising participation in the performing arts locally, patrons of the Center say Jackson Hole could be poised to make a name for itself in the performing arts. It is an area well-established as one of the great centers for wildlife art, and private endowments have allowed the Center to host, as temporary residents, some of the country’s venerable performing troupes.
Still, apart from the well-supported Grand Teton Music Festival symphony, some say it will take time for the valley to realize its potential as a progressive performing arts destination.
“We’ve got a big broad mission here,” said Richard Anderson, the marketing director for the Center. But while more mainstream shows tend to be sellouts, there is a growing sophistication in the demand of local audiences, Anderson added.
The Performing Arts Pavilion at the Center for the Arts, a comfortable yet rarified-feeling multi-purpose venue, opened in March of last year. The Center as a whole now houses 17 resident art and education-based, nonprofit groups, including Dancers’ Workshop. For a valley with an estimated population of 20,000 people – small when considering the performing arts are usually supported by larger metropolitan populations – the Center functions as a cultural resource with few peers in fly-over America.
“It’s unusual in that it’s a collective in itself,” said Steve Schultz, the Center for the Arts executive director, who relocated to Jackson Hole from the private sector to helm the Center in July 2007. “And the community, as far as I can tell, is beginning to see the Center and its residents as one kind of entity.”
To conceive and build the Center for the Arts was a huge undertaking that was more than 15 years in the making. A series of major fundraising drives yielded an initial endowment of about $35 million. Much of those funds were used in the two-phase construction of the Center - first the Arts & Education Pavilion, completed in 2004, and then the Performing Arts Pavilion.
The Arts & Education Pavilion houses the Center’s mixture of resident arts and educational organizations - from dance and photography to theater, sculpting and music – and has a sustainable business plan, Schultz said in an interview last week. But the Performing Arts Pavilion – the 500-seat, main stage, a music center and theater rehearsal space – needs a considerable endowment nest egg to secure the long-term future of top quality programming at the Center, he said.
The expenses involved in simply maintaining a large venue, not to mention the costs of bringing in world-class touring acts, makes the business of running a formidable performing center difficult. As a result, the Center becomes dependent on generous underwriting from individuals and the corporate world to sustain it with a sufficient endowment, Schultz said.
Jackson’s Center for the Arts faces many of the same funding issues as some of the nation’s top venues, such as the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., he added.
“Theaters are financially a hole in the ground universally,” Schultz said. “We know we’re going to have losses going into a lot of these performances.”
Now in its second year of programming, the Center this season will host a roster of familiar and household named performers – among them Willie Nelson, Keb’ Mo’ and Blues Traveler. Each performance on the main Center Stage is underwritten on an individual basis, made possible by private and corporate donors. Even if a given show sells out, it is not uncommon for the Center to take some financial loss, as it did with the Neville Brothers, Schultz and others said.
Some, including Case, have said too many cultural and entertainment opportunities force potential attendees, many of them burdened by an already high and yet continually rising cost of living in the valley, to miss out on what might be considered once-in-a-lifetime shows.
With the Neville Brothers playing days after the Jackson Hole Film Festival, for example, Case and others wondered aloud who would have money for ballet tickets, let alone to the Dancers’ Workshop fundraising gala, which featured a special performance by LINES.
“I think it’s a situation where our little population is saturated with great things to do,” Case said. “They all cost money, and people are having to pick and choose, and dance probably has less of an audience than some of the other art forms.”
Dancers’ Workshop is not the only local arts group struggling to fill seats.
Off Square Theatre, a Center tenant that stages a range of performances throughout the year – from holiday musicals to original works to the staging of more cutting-edge “black box” plays – is trying to figure out how to get more Jackson Hole residents and visitors into its shows.
“We’re a growing community theater, but we’re struggling for sure,” said Emy diGrappa, director of marketing for Off Square. DiGrappa dittoed some sentiments of Case, her neighbor at the Center for the Arts.
“Part of the problem is saturation,” she said. “The community is just stretched so thin.”
Off Square is not at a point where it sells out every performance – though some, such as the holiday performances, do. But it is not without some recent positive indicators that it is a community performance company on the rise. In a matter of a few years, Off Square’s operating budget jumped from around $400,000 to $1.1 million annually. The theater reported strong ticket sales for its most recent play, the Crusades-era “The Fourth Nail,” which was written and produced in-house and appears on its way for broader publication, according to artistic director John Briggs.
“It’s going to take us a few years to have a foundation,” Briggs said. “We need to get the infrastructure to have some large foundation monies that will allow the company to experiment more.”
Off Square is currently preparing to perform “Always … Patsy Cline” in early July. It is not exactly what would be considered cutting-edge theater but is a rather safe box office bet for summer season audiences, Briggs said.
In August, however, Off Square will continue to push the envelope for the second year running with a series of contemporary plays performed as “black box theater,” removing the conventional ideas of distance and stage sets for a more intimate audience experience.
“We’re doing some things that have never been done here in Jackson,” diGrappa said.
The Jackson Hole community will eventually warm to the idea of performing arts that might at first seem out of the comfort zone of what is already known and accepted here, said John Tozzi, who chairs the Center’s board of directors and helped drive the considerable fundraising efforts for the Center to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
“The cultural education that is taking place is not going to happen overnight,” Tozzi said. Meanwhile, the board is looking to begin a multimillion dollar capital campaign to endow the Center for the foreseeable future. But the real hope for a nest egg to nourish the performing arts pavilion for years to come lies in the renaming of Center Theater, which Tozzi said an individual or company could do for $10 million. That sum is a fraction of what similar naming opportunities have fetched in large, metropolitan areas.
“For me, the Center was always about Jackson Hole as an arts destination community,” Tozzi said.
For Candra Day, who was involved in the early conception of a community arts center in the 1990s, the progression of public arts in Jackson Hole can act as a kind of psychic salve, reconciling what is gone with what is to come.
“I always felt Jackson was very nostalgic about the past, discouraged about the future,” said Day, who co-founded and runs Vista 360, a world mountain culture exchange program. “It’s a ‘paradise lost’ feeling and I always thought the arts could balance that. Yes, we have a small audience. But let’s encourage people to come, because the future could have a rosier glow through the arts and culture.”
Photo by Marty SohlWill Jackson Hole become a thriving performing arts destination?PERMALINK:
Raising the curtain | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories
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