Telling Tales and Connecting Communities (cont'd)

AUDIENCE

"Audience is built one at a time," says Jennings-Roggensack. "It may take 20 years [for community interest] to take root. But I see it as a marathon, not a sprint."

The festival's true import may lie in its ability to nurture an art-going public and build audiences from previously untapped sources. But it was ASU's existing audiences that helped raise the $392,000 budgeted for the Untold Stories Festival. Each year, Public Events presents touring Broadway productions, like Bring In Da Noise, Bring In Da Funk, as well as big-name dance companies and orchestras, and things like Moto-Cross and dirt shows, as well as performances by country-western singer George Strait. "They're our cash-cows," Jennings-Roggensack says. "[And] we choose to put it back into the community."

ASU, as the presenter, packaged its entire 1998-99 season around the theme of Untold Stories, wrapping the festival within its marketing materials for its offerings of Miss Saigon, Phantom of the Opera and the National Symphony of Mexico.

Even so, the audience on that last weekend was meager. Some of the problem rests with the venue, ASU's Gammage Auditorium, a monumental 3,000-seat space. The huge proscenium stage, suitable for grand opera, swallowed the performers and distanced the audience. "It didn't feel like an intimate visit, but more life 'culture on display,'" says Roadside's Cocke. "No one felt any ownership of the space."

ASU's decision to hold the finale at Gammage was a calculated gamble. "It was important that they come to Gammage," says Andreya Hernandez, ASU's director for the project. The festival was about finding theater within individual communities, "but it also recognizes that it can speak to you outside your culture. We saw [Gammage] as a way to expand horizons." Staging the festival in Gammage was also a way to acknowledge that community stories were as important as professional performances, she says.

But the town-gown split remained. "The assumption from the community outside the confines of the campus is that they don't think it's their place, even if they can afford to go," says Holden. "It's seen as someone else's property. And that's even more evident in new and transient communities." Marketing materials, from slick brochures and the insistence on buying a season rather than tickets to individual performances, "make it look like an insider's club," she says.

Hernandez agrees it was difficult to interest a general audience in the material. "The whole idea of stories is difficult to grasp," she says. "We're fighting a barrier. People are programmed to think that theater is Broadway, and they don't want to be grounded in reality. It's all a learning process," she says.

Jennings-Roggensack thinks one of the problems was the very diversity of the participants. "It's unrealistic in a community this large and diverse to expect them to follow a project over four days or a weekend." What appeared to happen was that people turned out to watch groups from their particular community and then left. "Why isn't someone else's story interesting?" Jennings-Roggensack asks. "How do you get past preaching to the choir? It's a big issue for us. We don't know the answer."

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