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A Longer, Lower-Intensity Festival
1999 international fest will be more on European model, director says
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Business New Haven
12/14/1998
By: Michael C. Bingham
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The 1999 International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven will span 16 days, feature more ticketed events and an expanded “ideas” component.
Increasingly, says festival director Paul Collard, “The model of the festival is not a traditional festival in the American sense” - with much intense activity over a relatively short time span. “Our event is much more on the European model, with a lower level of activity over a greater length of time.”
Bringing 35,000 people onto the Green for a Little Richard concert last July is a worthwhile enterprise, Collard says. But it's really not the niche that the three-year-old New Haven event wants to fill as it evolves. The 1999 event will take place from June 18 through July 3.
In hopes of engaging the brains of attendees as well as their sense, Collard says a greater relative emphasis will be placed on exploring ideas as well as performing and visual arts.
Last year's event featured a conference called “Cities of the Future” which brought together urban experts to discuss and theorize about the evolution of urban areas. Next year will see “Cities That Work,” exploring successful economic development in cities across the nation and around the world.
Other thinking person's events will explore primary education and early childhood development, Collard says, as well as a third conference entitled “War & Peace,” tentatively to be chair by Yale professor and author Paul Kennedy.
Since arriving in New Haven in 1997, Collard has emphasized that his goals for the festival are “economic regeneration and social cohesion.” He is frank about the fact that the event to date may have succeeded more in the latter realm than in the former. “If we bring people here and show them that New Haven is a wonderful place,” he says, “hopefully they'll come back.”
After speaking with downtown merchants and restaurateurs, Collard says he concluded that the 1998 festival was a greater boon to the latter, who served hundreds of meals to event attendees, than to the former. Those attending mass events such as the Little Richard concert didn't wish to shop and carry their bags of merchandise onto the Green with 35,000 other people, he says.
The Royal Shakespeare Company will be in New Haven for two weeks in conjunction with the festival staging an adaptation of Shakespeare's Troilus & Cressida set in the early 20th century, as well as a production of Turgenev's A Month in the Country at Long Wharf Theatre.
Also on stage, the Los Angeles-based theater company Cornerstone is creating a commissioned work, an adaptation of Bertold Brecht's Good Woman of Szechwan to be retitled Good Person of New Haven using both professional actors and local residents. The work will be featured in three workshop performances during the festival and appear fully staged at Long Wharf Theatre during the 1999-2000 season, Collard says.
In all, the 1999 festival represents a step in the evolution of the New Haven event that Collard hopes will attract visitors from far and wide to the festival - and to New Haven.
“We're close to developing a package that someone would get on an airplane” to come see, Collard says. “We want to create the ability to offer realistic tourism packages over, say, three days.”
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