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One Fest, One Site
Int'l Festival of Arts & Ideas will concentrate on New Haven
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Business New Haven
1/22/2001
By: BNH
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There's no place like home.
After an unfulfilling fling with Stamford and New London, organizers of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas have decided to get back to where it once belonged: New Haven.
Last year, its fifth, the festival expanded to 17 days and added event suites in Stamford and New London, the latter mainly dance events presented at Connecticut College.
It didn't work. Of 175,000 festival attendees, a scant 10,000 attended IFAI events in the two satellite cities. That's why festival director Paul Collard announced January 11 that the 2001 festival would concentrate exclusively on Elm City venues.
To Collard, the silver lining is clear. “The collaboration between the three cities was smooth and effective,” he says, “raising the profile of the festival, increasing the range of programming we could present and increasing overall attendance.
“While it has become clear how this collaboration could be further developed, changes in leadership in New London and competing priorities in Stamford make it difficult for our partners to allocate the resources necessary to grow this partnership in 2001.”
Collard added: “We continue to explore how we might collaborate in the future. In the meantime, a festival of the same scale as 2000 is being planned, although it will all take place in New Haven.”
For example, Collard says only two percent of attendees at last year's Stamford events originated from a Stamford ZIP code. The bulk, he says, came from New Haven.
Among the highlights of the 2001 event is a return of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Metropolitan Opera. The RSC will present Carol Goldoni's 18th-century farce, A Servant to Two Masters, June 14 to June 24. The Metropolitan Opera, which last year presented a concert rendition of Madama Butterfly, will reprise its success with concert performance of Puccini's Tosca.
As for the remainder, arts-lovers will simply have to wait. The dance program will be announced next month, said Collard. Most of the theatrical offerings will be announced in March, with the musical program to be unveiled in April.
The 2001 IFAI will take place over 17 days, from June 14 to June 30. Its $4 million budget will be commensurate with the 2000 figure - but concentrated in one place.
This place.
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