March 29, 2007

Several hundred villagers took part in last weekend’s community visioning process on a proposed arts center at the First Presby-terian Church, sponsored by the Center for the Arts Steering Committee. Pictured at the celebration feast on Sunday are, top from left, Mary Beth Burkholder, Kaethi Seidl, Amy Harper, Sam Ruark and Nadia Malarkey. See more photos here.

By Diane Chiddister

A national story-telling festival. Spaces for artists to live and work. An international program for artists-in-residence. A summer festival of original plays. Intergenerational collaboration on arts events. A revival of the Antioch College Shakespeare festival. A Dave Chappelle emerging comedian festival.

These are some of the many ideas — serious and whimsical, big and small (but mostly big) — suggested by villagers at last weekend’s community workshop sponsored by the Yellow Springs Center for the Arts. Up to 300 villagers took part in the event’s eight sessions, according to organizers on Sunday.

The event aimed to provide villagers the opportunity to engage in a visioning process around a proposed new arts center. At the event’s wrap-up on Sunday, several villagers said the workshop succeeded in its goals by bringing people together to create a shared vision.

“The most important thing was the number of people involved and so having the ownership of the center spread around,” according to Barbara Forster of The Antioch Company, who attended several sessions. “People seemed genuinely excited.”

For Nancy Mellon of the Village Artisans, the workshop succeeded by including so many people’s dreams and perspectives. The high level of community participation and the event itself gave her confidence that the project will move ahead.

“There’s a seriousness behind it, and people are doing the right steps to get it done,” she said. “I think it’s going to happen.”

The weekend was sponsored by the Yellow Springs Center for the Arts Steering Committee, a group of villagers which has been meeting for a year to consider creating the new center. With support from the Morgan Family Foundation, the group hired two Minneapolis-based arts consultants to assist in the process of creating an arts center.

At the summary presentation, celebration and community feast on Sunday afternoon, the consultants, Tom Borrup and George Sutton, presented their responses to the visioning process. (See sidebar). Villagers dreamed big, the two said.

“This is an ambitious program,” Borrup said. “But these are the values we heard.”

In their presentation, Borrup and Sutton outlined what they perceive as the village’s cultural assets, relevant circumstances and challenges regarding creating a new center.

Yellow Springs’ cultural assets are considerable, Borrup said. Those assets include Yellow Springs’ long history as the source of “creative entrepreneurship,” an “extraordinarily high value” placed on the arts by community members, a large number of artists who live here, a community that values tolerance for diverse lifestyle choices, an unusual breadth of cultural activities for a small village, an extremely high level of volunteer activities, a high level of commitment to lifelong learning and the arts in education, and the capacity, proved during the weekend’s activities, of the steering committee to bring the community together.

According to the consultants, the community’s physical cultural assets include Kelly Hall and other Antioch College arts facilities, the Little Art Theater, the Mills Lawn gym, Shirley/Jones Gallery, the Glen Helen Center, the John Bryan pottery shop, Xenia Avenue storefronts, the First Presbyterian Church, the Bryan Center and the streets of the village.

Approaching the project with an eye toward the community’s strengths is essential to moving ahead, Borrup said.

“We look at what we can build on, what we have rather than what’s missing,” he said.

“Relevant circumstances” to creating an arts center — which may or may not be an actual new physical space — in Yellow Springs include villagers’ strong desire to “do something unique that sets Yellow Springs apart,” a high level of commitment to local schools, a dynamic relationship between the community and the college and concern over the college’s future, a high level of commitment to preserving the surrounding natural environment, a high value placed on “small town feel,” and the sense of a “void” for past cultural activities that were viewed as “bringing great value” to the town.

The summary presentation also included Yellow Springs’ challenges in creating a new arts center. These challenges, identified by the consultants, include the arts community’s current “lack of structure,” with its high reliance on volunteer effort; the high level of deferred maintenance at local arts facilities; an investment in facilities requiring an investment in maintenance, administration and programming, and low ticket prices.

The summary followed two days of eight workshops, with individual gatherings focused on economic development and tourism, community-wide learning, theater and dance, film and video arts, visual arts, music, literary arts and social and spiritual life. In each workshop, participants took part in a similar visioning process, which involved imagining that they were celebrating the arts center at its 50th anniversary, and identifying what, exactly, they were celebrating. The workshops were facilitated by arts educators Ta-coumba Aiken and Harry Waters, Jr.

On Sunday, workshop participants gathered again to celebrate their work and their vision, followed by a feast catered by Current Cuisine. According to Borrup and Sutton, their work now begins as they distill the many ideas and visions they heard. They will return in three months with recommendations, to be followed later by a conceptual plan.

To Becky Morean, who has lived in Yellow Springs a few years, coming to the workshops helped her feel confidence in the village’s ability to move ahead toward a common goal.

“I keep hearing how divisive it is, and how hard to build a consensus here,” she said at the Sunday event. “But in the workshops I kept hearing over and over a common vision.” The e-mail address for the arts center is ysartscenter@gmail.com.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnew.com