Arts festival to extend next year's season

Sarasota will soon be home to an international arts festival that will present new, classical, original and cutting-edge performances and extend the traditional winter cultural season into early fall.

The Ringling Museum of Art and the Baryshnikov Arts Center of New York announced plans Monday for a five-day multidiscipline arts festival to be held every two years, beginning next fall in Sarasota.

The Ringling International Arts Festival, scheduled for Oct. 7 through Oct. 11, 2009, will include music, visual art, dance and theater. Some of the works will be commissioned specifically for the festival by the Baryshnikov center, which was founded and is led by dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov.

The idea of the festival was praised by Sarasota arts and tourism leaders as a magnet for visitors and creativity in the community. The news came one day after the Hermitage Artists Retreat on Manasota Key announced the new $30,000 Greenfield Prize to commission new works each year from artists of different disciplines.

"This will set the stage for more new work being seen in Sarasota," said Bruce Rodgers, executive director of the Hermitage. "I think the more the merrier. The more that you're exposed to it, kind of like vegetables when you're young, the more likely you are to acquire a taste for it."

The festival will be modeled after the 31-year-old Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., which features 100 performances of music, dance and theater over a two-week period.

Stanford Makishi, executive director of the Baryshnikov Arts Center, said the Ringling festival will "have its own personality. We hope this will be a reflection of what we do at the center, the kind of artists we support, which tend not to be always mainstream, but who represent artistic excellence."

The Baryshnikov center, a multidiscipline creative lab that was created in 2005 to house the activities of the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation, will be responsible for the artistic programming and overall vision of the festival.

The Ringling Museum will deal with organizing, managing and marketing the event on its 66-acre campus, including the courtyard, the museum's Historic Asolo Theater, and the Mertz and Cook theaters inside the nearby FSU Center for the Performing Arts.

Baryshnikov visited the museum about a year ago "and he really was so taken by the beauty of the grounds and the three theaters on the campus that he thought, 'Sure, why not. Let's do a festival,'" Makishi said.

Baryshnikov's visit came about through a connection with Ringling board member and former state Sen. John McKay, said Dwight Currie, the museum's curator of theater programming.

Currie said the initial festival budget has not been set but likely will be at least $750,000. He said money is set aside for the event, and he hopes tickets will be kept in the $25 range.

Details of the performances will not be announced until mid-January, Makishi said. But the festival will open Oct. 7, 2009, with a concert of music by Liszt and Beethoven. It will be performed by the Festival Orchestra, led by Atlanta Symphony Music Director Robert Spano and made up of musicians from Florida. The concert will feature pianist Pedja Muzijevic, director of music programming at the Baryshnikov center.

Currie said such a festival was part of the master plans that led to redevelopment of the museum grounds and the creation of several new buildings in the last few years.

"What we want to do with the festival is publicly and in a very big way, announce that the arts season really starts in October now," Currie said. "It is no longer the traditional January, February and March."

That is good news to Virginia Haley, executive director of the Sarasota Convention and Visitors Bureau, who said October is a "huge need time" in terms of tourism.

Haley also said the festival could be a good way to promote the area's cultural life after the Sarasota County Arts Council canceled the 2009 Arts Day festival.

"This fits within our advertising campaign to go beyond the beaches," Haley said. "It's that wide offering of cultural activities that differentiate us from our competition."

Makishi and others from the Baryshnikov center were due in Sarasota Monday night for meetings and more specific planning on how the festival will be set up.

Makishi, who is also an artistic adviser at the center, is working with Baryshnikov and Muzijevic to develop lists of possible performances.

"We want to consider more than we could possibly program so we have the right mix of dance, theater and music that makes sense programmatically and represents our artistic point of view," he said.

Courtesy of the Herald Tribune
By Jay Handelman


Published: Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 1:01 a.m.