Elon Trotman.
Jazz heavyweights and artistic emissaries from Africa will mix with New Haven’s finest talent at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas this year. That’s just the way Chad Herzog, co-executive director of the festival and director of programming, wants it, as the festival continues to deal with a tighter state budget by sinking its roots deeper into the Elm City.
Given the wrangling over the state budget and particularly arts funding in the past year, “we’re very grateful that we’re a line item,” said Herzog. “There have been times when we’ve been lined out, and we’ve had to work with our local legislators to get back in.”
In 2016 the festival operated on revenues of $4,205,352, of which $705,431 of that came from government grants. The festival now falls under the state’s Office of Tourism.
Courtesy A&I
Herzog.
Part of the reason for the continued support, Herzog believes, is that “we have 22 years of economic impact surveys” showing how many people the festival draws and where they’re from. It turns out that half of festival participants come from the greater New Haven area — the city proper and surrounding towns. The other half come from not only over 100 towns across the state, but half the states in the country, and two dozen foreign countries.
It also means the festival organizers can track the effects of programming choices. “Last year we cut a week off the Green programming,” Herzog said. The decision was reflected in the survey results, which showed that the festival had drawn 85,000 to New Haven in the summer of 2017 as opposed to about 100,000 in 2016. The number 15,000 felt about right as the number of one successful concert on the Green.
In response, A&I shifted its programming to get five headlining acts onto the Green instead of three. Jazz heavies Elan Trotman with Rohn Lawrence and Special Guests, along with the Rahsaan Langley Project, will kick off those concerts on June 9 at 6 p.m. The all-female nueva-mariachi Flor de Toloache and Las Cafeteras follow the next day, June 10, also at 6 p.m. Hip hop/R&B mixologists Whodini appear on June 13 at 6:30 p.m. Snger-songwriter Ruth B appears on the Green on June 16 at 7 p.m. Iraqi-American trumpeter Amir ElSaffar and the Rivers of Sound Orchestra closes out the concert series with a collaboration with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra on June 17 at 4 p.m.
This shift in programming also means that the festival doesn’t officially close after Ruth B’s Green concert. Programming — from Congolese artist Toto Kisaku’s harrowing theater piece Requiem for an Electric Chair to Mark Morris Dance Group’s new piece Pepperland to numerous tours and lectures — continue through June 23.
“It is a different way of thinking about the festival,” Herzog said, “that’s different from running a typical performing arts season.” By that Herzog means the kind of season that an arts organization might schedule when they have a single site — a theater, a festival grounds — that they own.
“What’s great is about us being able to remain nimble,” Herzog said. “Had we been stuck owning a performing arts center and building, we wouldn’t have been able to do that.”
As the festival gears up for June while plotting its course for the next couple years, facing a fiscal environment that seems sure to stay lean, it also means strengthening its bonds with the institutions in town that make the festival possible, from the city, to Yale, to the churches on the Green — where A&I’s Altar’d concert series will take place again — to community organizations across New Haven.
The first year of the Altar’d series, “we didn’t know how to measure success,” Herzog said. It was an experiment. The series learned the hard way that dance pieces don’t work as well as they could, as the people in the pews are too much at the same level as the church altars themselves. But music and theater performances worked great — as did “the sense of ownership that the churches took for the work itself.”
For the Altar’d series, acts apply to be considered. Who gets to perform where is left up to church leaders. This year, as church leaders reviewed some of the applicants, they talked among themselves about which acts would work better at which church. “This really is a partnership between the artists, the church, and festival,” Herzog said.
As a result — among other shows — Elegant Primates, which infuse pop with Latin, African, and Caribbean elements, appears June 12 at 8:45 p.m. at First and Summerfield United Methodist Church. Ugandan fusion group Zikina performs at Trinity Church on the Green on June 14 at 7:30 p.m. Jazz and R&B band The Recess Bureau grooves on June 19 at 7 p.m. at First and Summerfield. And improv project Carte Noire plays on June 19 at 8 p.m. at United Church on the Green.
In that Altar’d program, the artist gets a third of the gate. The church gets another third. The Festival gets the final third to defray the costs of production and ticketing. As we were talking the nuts and bolts of how the concerts are financed, Herzog pointed out that the $10 ticket price doesn’t cover the festival’s expenses. The goal is to make the ticket affordable, not to cover costs.
Even after the state and institutional support the festival receives, “it’s the individual donors that make the Festival work. It’s the individual donors that make it possible for us to offer $10 tickets,” Herzog said. “There are some performances where it may cost us $130 for each person to witness something, and we’re charging $25.” It’s not about breaking even. It’s not even close to it. “But that’s not how we’re set up.”
In keeping with reaching out to more of New Haven, A&I continues to strengthen its neighborhood festivals — thanks to a new energy coming from the neighborhoods themselves.
“This is the sixth year of us doing the festivals,” Herzog said. “For the first five, we called them pop-up festivals.” Last year, on a Sunday afternoon midway through the festival, the festival organizers brought all the neighborhood organizers together. It was the first time all three neighborhoods had come together for one meeting. Ideas started flying.
“One of the big outcomes of that meeting was that they would like to meet again,” Herzog said. “It was kind of a facepalm thing.” They reconvened in October, “and the same energy was there.”
The first big change was to the name of the programming — which suggested bigger changes to come.
“We’ve been popping up for five years,” Herzog recalled meeting participants saying. “We’re kind of here to stay. Can we drop the name?” Herzog agreed.
“A couple minutes later,” Herzog said, “people said, ‘now that we’re working together so well, what do you think would happen if we took the best of our neighborhoods to the Green?’”
Herzog agreed on the spot. “The looks I got were, ‘don’t you have to take that to someone?’” he said.
So on June 9, Herzog said, “we come together. We celebrate the city. We celebrate our neighborhoods. Each neighborhood is bringing one of their headlining acts to the Green.” The event is anchored by the concert on the Green that features Rohn Lawrence, a long-time staple of the New Haven music scene whose influence reaches well beyond it.
Meeting together more often has also meant more conversation among New Haven’s neighborhoods. “The invitiaton happened from each other,” Herzog said. “The Hill said to Dixwell, ‘you need to come to our festival.’ It happened back and forth. That’s why that’s going to work.”
All three neighborhood festivals are moving locations because the neighborhood organizations felt the festivals would be better in other spots. The Hill’s festival, on May 19, is in the Cornell Scott Hill Medical Center parking lot on Columbua Avenue. Dixwell’s festival is happening right after the Freddy Fixer parade on May 20, in the parking lots behind Stetson Library on Dixwell Avenue. Fair Haven’s festival lands in Criscuolo Park on May 26.
“Because the communities have organized their own festivals for five years, they’re experts,” Herzog said. “We’re there to support, but supporting is all we’re doing. These are the neighborhood’s festivals, and I think it’s pretty obvious from all the partnerships they’ve developed. And coming together on June 9 — I can’t wait to have everybody celebrating together.”
The International Festival of Arts & Ideas runs June 9 to June 23 all over New Haven. For more information and a full calendar of its programming, visit the festival’s website.
uhhhhh.....jazz heavyweights? Pop music maybe, but jazz and improvised music remains shamefully un-represented by the arts and ideas fest (and there is a decided age bias, from what I have seen, with the state acts almost entirely young). New Haven has a rich jazz heritage which it seems intent on abandoning.