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Arts
for All
New
Haven would be an arts hub with or without that big university in the middle of
town.
May/June 2009
by Christopher Arnott
Christopher
Arnott has covered the arts in New
Haven, as a reporter and critic, since 1985.
You
could argue that New Haven was destined to be an arts town, even more than it
was meant to be a university town. F. Scott Fitzgerald did, in his short story
"Head and Shoulders":
When
way back in colonial days the hardy pioneers had come to a bald place in
Connecticut and asked of each other, 'Now, what shall we build here?' the
hardiest one among 'em had answered: 'Let's build a town where theatrical managers
can try out musical comedies!' How afterward they founded Yale College there,
to try the musical comedies on, is a story every one knows.
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The New Haven arts can be as inclusive as Yale's can be exclusive.
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The
local arts scene certainly complements the university's own cultural
contributions. The New Haven arts can be as inclusive as Yale's can be
exclusive. While the university prides itself on small, intensive arts programs
with highly competitive admissions processes, New Haven offers unjuried
exhibitions for hundreds of artists at a time, and summer festivals where some
of the state's best known troubadours rub shoulders with neighborhood gospel
choirs, double-dutch troupes, and cover bands. Performance space is affordable,
audiences eager and open-minded. It's easy for novices to break into the
friendly-not-cliquey music and theater scenes, where originality and
risk-taking are prized over slavish recreation of the latest national trends.
New
Haven long ago claimed, and has never been seriously challenged for, the mantle
of "cultural capital of Connecticut." It's a hard-won honor, considering the
city was founded by Puritans, and that public entertainment as innocuous as circuses
was still being challenged by New Haven's Court of Common Council as late as
the mid-nineteenth century.
The
tide changed rapidly. Even if Yale had not decided in 1716 to move to New
Haven, the city would have marked out its place on the cultural map thanks to
location, location, location. Less than three hours' drive from Boston and less
than two from New York, New Haven has been a convenient stop for touring acts for
centuries, from musicians in the colonial era to vaudevillians at the turn of
the twentieth century and slews of rock bands today. The Shubert Theater opened
in 1914 and quickly established itself as a safe place to preview and revise
new plays and musicals away from the cloying and carping of the New York
critics. The hundreds of successes nurtured by the Shubert include the
best-known works of Rodgers & Hammerstein, Tennessee Williams, and Neil
Simon.
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New Haven can import and export talent to nearby New York and Boston.
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The
proximity to New York and Boston has also meant the city can sustain more arts
organizations, importing and exporting talent along the commuter lines. New
Haven has one of the oldest symphony orchestras in the country, and it
maintains a sizable modern dance community for its size. But it's the theater
throng that is most impressive. Most states are blessed if they have a single
regional theater strong enough to lure major stars and get noticed by the Tony
Awards. New Haven has two -- the Yale Repertory Theatre and the Long Wharf -- and
there are two others within an hour's drive (the Goodspeed Opera House and
Hartford Stage).
The
city also harbors several small theater troupes. Actors from the community
theaters have used walk-on parts at the Long Wharf and the Rep to gain points
toward Actors' Equity union membership and hasten their moves to New York or
Hollywood. Some make the leap directly from New Haven to Off-Broadway -- or
better. Daniel Sarnelli cut his teeth with the local group Naked Theatre and
then, in 1997, got a small role in the Long Wharf's East Coast premiere of a
little-known play called Wit. After the play won the Pulitzer, he stayed on for the
show's New York run and then won a more prominent part in its national tour.
Sometimes
proximity to larger metropolises can be a negative. Art collectors like to buy
their canvases in New York City, so New Haven has seldom been able to support
more than a handful of commercial art galleries. On the nonprofit side of the
visual arts equation, however, the city is saturated with small galleries, as
well as organizations that promote fresh opportunities for the many practicing
artists living in town. Artists' colonies have sprung up in poorer parts of
town, like the dilapidated lofts of Daggett Street, or wherever apartment
complexes sit atop noisy bars and clubs. And the community got a boost when the
Arts Loft West development was built in Westville, with nine affordable housing
units for income-challenged professional artists.
Every
year the nonprofit gallery and general arts cheerleading organization Artspace
holds City-Wide Open Studios, a multi-day event in which artists open their
workspaces and display their work to the general public. The art-lovers' trek
from studio to studio is assisted with directories, maps, special events, and
bike and bus tours. Many other cities hold open studios, but Artspace changed
the rules when it realized how many local artists were excluded from the
program because they didn't have studios that could accommodate visitors. So a
volunteer army of accessible-arts advocates formed, and schools, office
buildings, and abandoned factories were refurbished overnight into temporary
galleries. That effort has subsided somewhat in recent years as Artspace concentrates
on building its legitimacy as a year-round downtown gallery. But at its height
in the late 1990s CWOS arranged exhibition space for hundreds of artists and
created an arts party atmosphere that required three weekends and dozens of
locations to contain.
New
Haven also raised the bar on summer arts festivals. Many U.S. cities hold music
festivals, and a few add theater, dance, and academic lectures to the mix. But
the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, born in 1996, does more by
following the European model: dozens of events at numerous locations, spread in
leisurely style over a two-week schedule, along with -- as an anchoring outdoor
presence -- free entertainment two or three times a day, or all afternoon, on the
Green.
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One of New Haven's favorite artistic subjects has become . . . itself.
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The
festival provides a major tourism boost to the downtown economy during the
ghost-town doldrums of late June. Whether it will survive after this year, now
that Connecticut governor Jodi Rell has threatened its state funding, remains
to be seen. Its legacy, however, is secure. It has hosted world and North
American premieres; Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen opened here, with its original
British cast, a year before hitting Broadway. Headline performances have
included Little Richard, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a major Martha Graham
revival, and a critically acclaimed Spanish flamenco star. And the rest of the
entertainment ranges from performance artists, street theater, and poetry slams
to Chinese opera singers and jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard. As for "Ideas,"
that part of the festival brings in lectures, discussions, and tours, whether
on national and international topics or New Haven's own social, environmental,
and political issues.
So
arts-identified is the city that one of New Haven's favorite artistic subjects
has become . . . itself. In 1996, Arts and Ideas commissioned the
New York City-based puppet troupe Great Small Works to produce a town history.
Last year, the Yale Cabaret staged a piece called Sidewalk Opera, by composer Jana Hoglund '08MFA
with Patricia McGregor '09MFA and Jacob Padron '08MFA. It was devised from
interviews with clients of the St. Thomas More soup kitchen and structured
around a day in the life of Annette Walton, the street-corner vendor who has
sold carnations to almost everyone who ever walked through downtown.
But
the ultimate New Havenism might be the 2005 set of trading cards -- "Local Characters/Downtown
New Haven," masterminded by Leslie Kuo '03 -- that immortalized such arts fixtures
as Roger Uihlein, who runs Neverending Books; abstract painter Eric Staats; and
street poet Margaret Holloway '80MFA (known for reciting Shakespeare and
Chaucer for pocket change). Too parochial? Too insider? Not for the New
Yorker, which
covered the cards in 2006.
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There is a constant give-and-take among city and university arts resources.
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For
better or worse, Yale has not always taken a deep interest in its host city's
arts scene. Townies have variously characterized this attitude as snobbery,
obliviousness, academic myopia, or the mutual aww-who-needs-'em-anyhow segregation
of town and gown. For Frances "Bitsie" Clark, the cultural divide between Yale
and New Haven has been happily dissolving since the mid-1980s, and she gives
the credit to President Levin. Clark headed the Arts Council of Greater New
Haven for 19 years, then became alderwoman for Ward 7 (which encompasses the
Audubon and College streets arts districts). "When I came to the arts council
in 1983, there was a great arts community, doing incredible things. But they
didn't all work together. It was not connected." Worse, "the university was an
enclave. They always had this attitude that Yale didn't relate to the [New
Haven] community. When Levin became president, that all changed. He said, 'We
have to pay attention to the environment.'"
Now
there are endless collaborations -- workshops, summer classes, joint productions -- a
constant give-and-take among city and university arts resources. Yale students
and high school students collaborate on murals. The Yale School of Music stages
its major opera productions at the Shubert, and the New Haven Symphony performs
in Woolsey Hall. Rap idol Ludacris spoke at a packed Branford College master's
tea earlier this year, thanks to Greg Morehead, a New Haven alderman who drums
for Ludacris's back-up band.
Bitsie
Clark, too, has been turned into art, impersonated onstage at the Yale Rep by
Herbert Siguenza of the California-based comedy trio Culture Clash. Siguenza
seized on Clark's comment about seeking election during the Yale strike of
2002 -- "When I ran for office, I never wore blue." New Haven, as F. Scott
Fitzgerald knew, has its own color, contrast, ironic juxtaposition, intelligent
audiences, innate talent: everything you need for a good show.
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