ArtsCape's 'new vision'

We're only a day away from the ArtsCape community arts festival. Don't know what ArtsCape is? It's been splashed all over the pages of our newspaper -- well maybe not all over -- for the past week.

Basically ArtsCape is a community festival celebrating the arts in Cape -- music, visual art, all that good stuff. The setting: Capaha Park.

In the past couple of years the festival has had musical entertainment as its centerpiece in the form of touring acts like kid-friendly Grammy award winners Trout Fishing in America. Last year Trout Fishing helped bring in people from outside the area who may not have even known about ArtsCape. Those fans got to see the band for free, right here in Cape.

This year things are different. ArtsCape is organized by the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri, and the arts council board members who used to lead the ArtsCape organizing charge have rotated off the board -- primarily Claudia Ruediger, Rhonda Weller-Stilson and Dennis Seyer. The old members saw the festival as a chance to expose local arts lovers to acts they hadn't seen before, and maybe bring in some tourism, too. With last year's festival the plan seemed to have worked -- somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people showed up for the one-day event.

But the current board members wanted to change things this year, forgoing the touring acts in favor of a showcase of local talent. The reason, they say, is to save some cash. Last year's festival cost the arts council about $11,000, this year's will probably cost the group about $6,500. The arts council cites a lean budget and a desire to focus more on local artists as reasons for the reduction in cost.

Those figures don't quite present the clearest picture of ArtsCape, its organization and the resources that make the festival happen. Sure, on the face of it you might say the new board members are being more fiscally responsible, not blowing as much money on a one-time event, saving some of that cash for other arts council programming. What those numbers don't show is how important sponsorship was to making the festival what it was in previous years.

Last year about $19,000 was raised, both cash and in-kind, to make the festival happen, according to Ruediger's estimates. Without that money ArtsCape wouldn't have been what it was, and Trout Fishing probably never would have performed in Cape Girardeau. Organizers made it happen though, starting off their planning early -- the preceding September, to be exact.

This year arts council executive director Delilah Tayloe said about $4,000 cash has been raised through sponsorship, but she's unable to put a sum on the in-kind donations, which include volunteer work and things like generators and the sound equipment and labor donated by Shivelbine's every year.

Here we have apples and oranges. These sponsorship figures give us little to compare and contrast, leaving us with a lack of evidence by which to evaluate the new approach by the current board.

I've talked to some people in the know who worry about ArtsCape and what will come of the festival. They worry that the arts council seeks to make ArtsCape an event that's focused too much on children and families, possibly to the exclusion of everyone else. They also worry that the current arts council leadership sees ArtsCape with a much narrower focus than in the past, one that they say is indicative of the general approach by the new leadership. That approach is exclusion, censorship and a view that the arts council's focus is almost completely on visual arts, they say.

For obvious reasons, they don't want to be named. Sticking your neck out in a small town can be tough.

I'll be the first to agree that ArtsCape is too focused on children and families. When I see the itinerary for this year's festival, little appeals to me as a young, married man with no children. I doubt I'm alone.

Ultimately, my opinion doesn't really matter, though. To use a term coined by President Bush, you will be the "decider," not me. When the curtain falls on ArtsCape Saturday night, we'll all have some idea about how well this new approach worked, and whether people without children thought the festival offered them something after all. And we'll have some idea whether the lack of touring performers like Trout Fishing and Brother Henry (who also played the festival last year) turned some people off.

The important thing is that the arts council leadership learns from this year's festival, regardless of the outcome.