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Forget Attitudes - Change
the Behaviors
Englishman Collard aims to broaden the International Festival
of Arts & Ideas' audience by widening its appeal
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Business New Haven
6/1/1998
By: BNH
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Forty-two-year-old Englishman Paul Collard was named director of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, which last year attracted an audience of about 50,000 to the Elm City, in October 1997. Before that he was chief executive of Northern Sights, which developed and produced Visual Arts UK, the largest visual arts festival ever staged in the United Kingdom. The New Haven event will be staged June 24-28 at sites throughout downtown and the Yale campus. Collard lives in New Haven with his wife and four children.
What factors moved you to take
on this challenge?
The size of the challenge. I'd just finished running a very large one-time festival in the north of England, Visual Arts UK. It ran for 37 weeks in 1996. It had a lot of similarities in terms of the agenda that was here. My contract was coming up and I was wondering what to do next. There was a lot of pressure on me to stay in England; the Labour Party had just come in, with which, for a number of reasons, I had become very close. But one of the things I felt was, I'm not interested in festivals in themselves; I'm interested in working within communities and using the arts to address economic and social issues within those communities. One of the things I found was that it's easier to do that effectively when you start anonymously. So I came to the conclusion that I wanted to go somewhere where people really didn't know me, and start again.
Why is it easier anonymously?
Because no one has any assumption as to what your agenda is. What I'm interested in doing with the festival is not bringing my agenda to this festival, but articulating this city's agenda into this festival. And as soon as people start thinking they know what your agenda is, they start talking to it. They no longer tell you what they really want to do; they start telling you what they think you'll support.
What was your understanding of what this city's agenda was, and how to express it through this festival?
When I got off the airplane [from England] I was handed a piece of paper that said, 'Economic regeneration and social cohesion - and that's what we want you to sort out.' In the first weeks I was here went through a process of very intensive discussions where we said, 'What do we mean by these things?' In terms of economic regeneration, I'm absolutely clear that this festival is concerned with the economic regeneration of downtown New Haven, by which I really mean the Nine Squares. That's where we can have an impact, and we've designed a festival to have that impact. Arts festivals don't build steel mills, or things like that, but they can help revitalize city centers.
How about social cohesion?
The festival needs to be an instrument which is helping to generate a public cultural life more reflective of the city's population. This city has a fantastic cultural life; there are 126 different nation cultures represented within the city, each of which has its own cultural life. But the public cultural life - the cultural life that sticks out, iceberg-like, above the water - is a very WASP cultural life: the [New Haven] Symphony, the Yale Center for British Art, and so on. It is not healthy for cities to have a public cultural life which is so much at variance with the actual cultural life.
When you first looked at this event last year, what did you see?
It thought it was a great festival, and I like virtually everything that I saw. What we've changed is where we've applied the economic and social agenda to the footprint to the festival so that it actually fits that agenda. If you take the economic agenda and say, 'This is about the regeneration of downtown,' the festival can bring a lot of people to downtown New Haven who, as a consequence of coming to the festival, come back after the festival is over. For me, the benchmark of success is not the number who come to the festival, but the number who return.
What people are you talking about?
The kind of people who are going to spend money - therefore we're talking about attracting an affluent audience - and who are arts-attendees already. I'm not about trying to persuade someone in Fairfield County who's not interested in the arts to get interested in the arts, and then to come to New Haven. That's too complicated. But if there's someone in Fairfield County who's interested in the arts and currently goes to New York, I want them to think, 'No, I'd rather go to New Haven.'
How do you do that?
It's a big challenge. People in Fairfield County go to New York, and New York - as the New York Times was saying modestly yesterday - is the cultural capital of the world. We have to develop a program for the festival which can compete. We then said, 'What do we want to do in terms of performance? Well, it could be opera and it could be ballet, but we actually don't have great opera and ballet performance spaces here, and they also attract a more narrow audience. So let's go with theater. If it's going to be theater, it has to be in English. If it's going to be English and appeal to that kind of audience, it has to be world-brand theater.' And that really said the Royal National Theatre [of London] or the Royal Shakespeare Company. By process of elimination we said, 'It's going to be the Royal National Theatre.' So we went to them and, very fortunately, persuaded them to come. That was how we got from the economic agenda to the Royal National Theatre. The second way you can do it is to put work that you already know, but put it in a location in New Haven which is so special that you'd rather see it in New Haven than see it somewhere else. So the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in a Yale courtyard, on a summer's evening, beneath the stars - that's a wonderful experience. You don't get that in New York.
How does this have a lasting economic impact?
Because those are the people who are likely to come back and visit the restaurants and go to the kind of shops which I think the Nine Squares need to develop if they are going to succeed economically - particularly as a consequence of the [Long Wharf] mall coming.
Any opinions about that project?
I think it's great, because it frees up the opportunity for us to think about what the right profile is for the Nine Squares, which I see as being one in retail and catering terms which is linked with the cultural and educational facilities you see there.
Even closer than Fairfield County, suburban consumers are increasingly disinclined to come downtown. Any strategy to attack that?
I have a particular philosophical feeling about this. When I first arrived here I went to a lot of receptions, particularly out in the suburbs, to talk about the festival. I'd talk to people and they'd say, 'Oh, I don't go to downtown New Haven. You can't park, it's dangerous, I don't feel comfortable, I don't feel safe...' The next night you'd go to the Symphony and you'd be standing in the foyer, and there'd be these people. And I'd say, 'I thought you didn't come downtown.” And they'd say, 'Oh, yes, but it's Itzhak Perlman.' Now my philosophy is called, 'Oh, Yes, But It's Itzhak Perlman.' The answer is, people have these attitudes about New Haven. And we could advertise until we're blue in the face to try to change those attitudes. The trick is not to change the attitudes, but just to work with the behavior. Such is the complexity and richness of human characteristics that attitude and behavior are not linked. Fortunately for New Haven, if you put on things that people want, they will come. They will forget they don't go to New Haven, and they will go because it's there. On the same night I went to Itzhak Perlman, [Neil Simon's] Proposals was sold out at the Shubert. The streets were full of cars, the sidewalks were full of people, the restaurants were full - and all of them with people who say, 'I don't go to New Haven.' So I'm convinced that you can change the behavior without trying to tackle the attitudes. The trouble with trying to tackle the attitudes is that it reminds people they have them.
Has anybody quantified the economic benefit of this event in its first two years?
We know from research that the spending [audiences] bring is just under $3 million. In addition, the festival itself raises just over $2 million each year, and the vast amount of that money gets reinvested back into this economy.
Where does that $2 million you raise come from?
About $900,000 is corporate. Around $600,000 comes from the state. About $300,000 comes from individuals, and the balance comes from foundations and the box office. The box office is a small part As the festival grows, that's going to get a lot bigger.
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