Dawn Tallman.
The International Festival of Arts and Ideas is taking over the New Haven Green again — for Labor Day weekend. The event, called “Vaccination & Vibes,” will feature two evenings of music, dance, and poetry that draw from talent in New Haven and elsewhere. It marks the A&I organization’s continued work in creating deeper connections with the New Haven community than it has in the past. Under the direction of Executive Director Shelley Quiala — who last August took the reins from co-directors Liz Fisher and Tom Griggs — the Labor Day weekend events are also A&I’s very public foray into throwing events outside of June, and even outside of the May-June summer programming it held this year.
Beginning at 5 p.m., Sept. 4 will feature the New Haven-based, Jamaican-born DJ Fire (a.k.a. Tafari Turner), New Haven indie rockers The Tines, and gospel singer Dawn Tallman, longtime collaborator with Chris “Big Dog” Davis, who was slated to perform at Arts and Ideas this summer but was rained out.
Sept. 5 will see an even fuller docket of performances beginning at 4 p.m. The evening — emceed by Alisa Bowens-Mercado and Withlove,Felicia — will unspool a bill ranging from poetry (Darlene Kascak and Josh Brown, a.k.a. AnUrbanNerd), dancing (hip hop from Team Leggoo, Chinese by Mulan Art School Dance Ensemble), and music (DJ LuxPro, neo-soul from Durand Bernarr, R&B from The Kennedy Administration, and Latin from Paco Godoy and his Gran Orquestra Internacional).
In addition — and in partnership with the New Haven Health Department — both evenings will have a vaccination clinic on the Green. Those who get vaccinated will be able to enter a raffle for $50 gift certificates toward classes and workshops at Creative Arts Workshop in the fall, tickets to a play at Long Wharf, free admission to the New Haven Museum, tickets for entire families to go to a New Haven Symphony concert, or tickets to two different productions at the Shubert.
Quiala.
“I like to say we’re living the answers to the questions,” Quiala said of the Arts and Ideas organization’s move toward programming well beyond the confines of the traditional summer weeks of activity that defined it for decades of its existence, with a eye toward making it possibly pretty much year-round. She reflected that when the festival first began 25 years ago, it was answering a question about what could bring more people to New Haven, and to the New Haven Green, at a time of year when the city was quieter than it was when its universities were in session.
“Now, 26 years in, the question is: are we doing the best for New Haven by doing a three-week model? Or is there something different that responds to the current context?” she said. “One of the things that I’ve heard and seen is that having relationships that last beyond June is critical” — with businesses, artists, and local arts organizations.
For Quiala, expanding Arts and Ideas’s programming also means working to make it more inclusive. She’s also looking at the fact that the audience changes throughout the year as students come into town, and hopes to create events to bring them in. But more fundamentally, in her conception, much of A&I’s programming in the past was aimed at an audience that “might also go into New York or into Boston” for their entertainment. “There’s a huge audience here that doesn’t have access to that,” she said. She’s hoping to do something about that.
In expanding the A&I organization’s programming, Quiala is building on work already done in the past few years. “The neighborhood festivals that are happening are part of the festival,” she said of the events A&I has thrown in The Hill, Dixwell, Newhallville, and elsewhere around town in recent years. “The fellowship program that happens in January in partnership in Gateway is part of the festival. When you just talk about the festival in June, all that gets hidden.”
Quiala is also looking to deepen relationships of “synergy, partnership, and support” with “arts organizations both burgeoning and robust” in New Haven, so that the festival becomes a “celebration of relationships,” and even helps strengthen the “arts ecosystem” that’s already here. For Quiala, that ecosystem includes anchors like Long Wharf Theatre and the Shubert, but extends to the panoply of smaller venues around New Haven, as well as smaller organizations like Elm City Lit and Black Haven.
“Between our bar scene and our theaters and our festivals,” she said, “you have an arts ecosystem that supports new, emerging, abstract, experimental, and traditional” artist and art forms. “The festival should be able to answer the question of what our commitment to local artists is in a way that makes sense.”
Quiala is all too cognizant that Arts and Ideas is emerging from the pandemic and its related shutdowns into an uncertain economic environment. “It was about survival for a lot of organizations and artists this year,” she said. Federal, state, and city emergency funding helped with that. But “the challenge is that it’s going to go away,” Quiala said. “So organizations — especially theaters, that pay most of their bills from earned revenue, and haven’t done that in the past two years, have to do it now in a context that people have been sitting at home streaming things…. Netfilx is our biggest competitor.”
Fundraising is part of the answer to that challenge. So is securing more permanent funding from government sources. But in the end, it’s also about drawing support from New Haven-area audiences who have shown in the past that they’re ready to support the arts, through ticket sales, attendance, and participation. “Clearly that culture exists here, and that’s why it’s a rich ecosystem,” Quiala said. “That’s not true everywhere.” With such a strong base to start from, she finds herself asking the next set of questions: “How do we make it even more equitable, even more progressive, and even more forward thinking?”
The questions take on more urgency as artists and arts organizations look into an undefined future. “I don’t think we’re going back to a ‘before time,’ when everything resets to normal. I don’t think there’s a normal anymore. We’ve been through too much,” Quiala said. For her, as artists and arts organizations continue to reinvent themselves, and find a way to get the compensation they need, there is a role for governments and foundations to play in better supporting cultural events and the artists who make them possible. “Now is a great time to throw out the ‘we’ve always done it that way’ answers” to the questions of why arts funding has been at the levels it has been in the past, and why it has been distributed as it has, in often inequitable ways. “We have to find new ways,” Quiala said.
So the Labor Day festivities are in some sense a glimpse of what lies ahead for A&I, whatever that may be. “Does that mean we’re going to do four mini-festivals a year? Does that mean we’re going to do programming in different venues throughout the year? I don’t know the answer to that” yet, Quiala said. “What I do know is that we want to have public-facing programming beyond June” — because “people live here year-round.”
“Vaccination and Vibes” happens Sept. 4 and 5 on the New Haven Green. Visit A&I’s website for information on Saturday, Sunday, and vaccination, as well as information about a self-guided art quest in partnership with Escape New Haven and Somos Arepas.