March 8, 2007

By Virgil Hervey

What started out as a modest project by Leadership Yellow Springs program participants may very well turn out to be what organizers hope will be the biggest thing to hit this town since Antioch College opened its doors in 1853. As a first step, the Yellow Springs Center for the Arts Steering Committee will hold a weekend of community workshops, starting on Friday, March 23, in Westminster Hall at the First Presbyterian Church.

“We are in phase one of a major project,” committee chair Jerome Borchers said in a recent interview. “These work shops are about listening to what the community would like to see in a center for the arts.”

The group, which has been in existence a year, hopes to bring to Yellow Springs a new arts center, and its members dream big. The workshops, which include such topics as economic development, tourism, spiritual and community life, literary arts, film, music, theater and dance, reveal the scope of their thinking.

An investment in the arts would yield substantial financial returns for the village, organizers said, and the program will kick off by addressing that subject. But steering committee member Tony Dallas, who brings a playwright’s point of view to the process, is quick to remind villagers that the arts offer many other benefits as well.

“There is merit to the arts aside from the bottom line,” Dallas said in a recent interview. “The arts are important. What we know of the Greeks is from their plays.”

Dallas would like to see the arts center bring community enrichment through the kind of conversations that might take place when internationally acclaimed artists come to town and mingle in the coffee houses. He would also like to see theater that addresses the role of who we are. That doesn’t happen very much, he said, because theater companies tend to perform plays that appeal to a certain audience in order to insure their own existence.

“We can create a different kind of theater,” he said. “People expect that of Yellow Springs.”

The arts center project began in the fall of 2004 when Hardy Ballantine proposed a project to raise money for the Yellow Springs Theater Arts Association. With the aid of fellow Leadership Yellow Springs participants Kristin and Jeff Lucas, organizers were able to put together the first of what would become an annual “curtain warmer” fundraiser before the high school spring musical. In the process they sparked in Lee and Vicki Morgan an interest in finding a community space for performing and visual arts.

According to Ballantine, Lee Morgan called him after the play, which was performed in the Mills Lawn School gymnasium, and asked him to set up a committee to explore the possibility of creating an arts center in Yellow Springs. In an attempt to gain broad community representation, Ballantine drafted Jerome Borchers, Louise Smith, John Fleming, Michael Cannon, Tony Dallas and Mary Campbell-Zopf. They met almost weekly as the Arts Center Working Group and sent copies of the minutes to Morgan.

Over time the working group grew to about 20 members and changed its name to the Yellow Springs Center for the Arts Steering Committee. With grant money from the Morgan Family Foundation, they were able to hire a project coordinator and eventually retain the services of two arts center consultants.

When the 1.6 acre Barr property at Xenia Avenue and Limestone Street came on the market in the fall of 2005, the Morgan Family Foundation purchased it as a potential site of a community performing arts center. At that time, Vicki Morgan told the News that beyond purchasing the property, the foundation had no intention of deciding what was to become of it.

However, recently the Barr property has been discussed as the possible location of a joint Friends Care Community and Yellow Springs Senior Citizens facility. And it’s too soon for the arts center group to focus on a specific location, according to Project Coordinator Laura Carlson.

Now that the Morgan Family Foundation has shown an interest in being a part of the funding, the discussion is being formalized in the series of workshops that have been designed by consultants Tom Borrup and George Sutton, who came on board in January.

According to Borchers, Borrup and Sutton, who have worked with many different communities, see Yellow Springs as a unique situation. The techniques that they will employ during the workshops will be designed to create a comfortable environment for interaction.

Both Borchers and Dallas stress the importance of these workshops. They want input from potential users, potential audiences, and the community as a whole.

“We have been building to this for a long time,” Borchers said. “We want people to come and participate.”

The members of the steering committee are Borchers, chair; Jane Baker, vice chair; Rob Lytle, treasurer; Carlson, project coordinator; Dallas; John Fleming; Tim Gilliland; Paul Graham; Chris Hill; Beth Holyoke; Gayle Rominger; Lara Donnelly; Abeo Miller; Jamie Sharp; Jerry Holt; Jim Malarkey; Maureen Lynch; and Mary Campbell-Zopf.

The schedule for the three days of workshops is as follows:

• Friday, March 23: 9:30–11:30 a.m., economic development and tourism; 3:30–5:30 p.m., community-wide learning; 7–9 p.m., film and media arts; and 7–9 p.m., theatre and dance ;

• Saturday, March 24: 9:30–11:30 a.m., social, spiritual and community life; 1:30–3:30 p.m., literary arts; and 1:30–3:30 p.m. music

• Sunday, March 25: 1–3 p.m., visual arts: 3:30–6 p.m., summary presentation and celebration feast

Contact: vhervey@ysnews.com