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Int’l Fest To Pay Its Way
N.H. arts event moves to build income base for future
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Business New Haven
5/1/2000
By: BNH
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The International Festival of Arts & Ideas is pursuing a long-term strategy to build an earned-income base to make the annual event less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of selling corporate sponsorships in an era of corporate instability.
To that end the New Haven festival, which this year will span 16 days beginning June 16, will rely on a greater proportion of paid-admission events than in years past, says festival director Paul Collard.
Collard is building from a relatively small base of ticketed events. For last year's festival, 12,000 tickets went on sale for all paid events, of which 11,000 were sold, says Collard, in large part due to the groundbreaking appearance at the festival of the Royal Shakespeare Co. (RSC).
This year, Collard says, some 40,000 tickets will be for sale to individual events. These include a return engagement by the RSC with 13 performances of Macbeth at Long Wharf Theatre as well as five performances of Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta H.M.S. Pinafore by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Co.
Notably, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas this year will also spread its wings to New London and Stamford. Dance performances in the former will take place mainly in Connecticut College's Palmer Auditorium, with tickets for paid events in the $15 to $20 range. Stamford's Rich Forum will likewise host a series of dramatic events, some ticketed.
Collard speaks of the large net outflow of arts audiences - and the dollars they spend - from New Haven, especially to New York. The phenomenon has been quantified by a recent draft study undertaken as part of the Regional Cultural Plan.
“Connecticut is a huge subsidizer of New York's cultural life,” Collard says. “If Connecticut could persuade Connecticut residents to spend more of that money here, it would have an enormous economic impact.”
The festival's largest recent announcement, however, was of a landmark free event. The Metropolitan Opera's concert performance of Puccini's Madama Butterfly June 30 on the New Haven Green is the Met's first complete opera performance in Connecticut within memory, Collard says.
In 1997, the year before Englishman Collard assumed the reins, the festival generated some $75,000 in earned income. His first year, 1998, that doubled to $150,000. Last year some $300,000 in ticket income was generated, he says.
Collard hopes to sell some $600,000 in tickets this year for events in the three Connecticut cities - and not just because that figure represents yet another 100-percent increase.
“Ideally, if we could get that figure up to about $1 million in two or three years, that would represent at the least the beginning of an income base that could sustain the festival for some years to come, and make it less dependent on sponsors,” Collard says.
Much of that challenge will belong to someone else, however: Collard has already announced that this year's festival - his third - will also be his last.
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