Last night, almost by accident, I stumbled upon one of QCA's QCAF funded events. I was in a mood, and needed a walk, so I headed northeast from my home in Long Island City, in the vague direction of Astoria (the other usual choice for me is to head south to the Vernon/Jackson/Court Square/Hunter's Point Area). As I was walking up 30th Street, I suddenly remembered it was Wednesday night--and the Federation of Italian American Organizations of Queens was hosting their outdoor performance series, called "Italian Nights," in Athens Square Park. It was not long before I heard the music!
And saw the crowd--talk about community involvement! It was one of those lovely cool summer nights; you could hear the music for several blocks in either direction, some people were obviously listening from the windows of their apartments. The cafes across the street from the park had sidewalks full of customers, enjoying their evening. In the park itself, the band, two performers called "Damir & Joe," one on keyboard, the other on guitar, and both singing, were set picturesquely against the backdrop of the Greek stone columns in the middle of the park. Couples danced below them, and the dance area was packed.
The audience was a mix of ages, and of ethnicities. I realize, in retrospect, that had such an event been held indoors at a dance hall, the audience might have been mostly middle-aged Italian Americans, dancing and enjoying the music. But because the performance was outdoors, anyone from the neighborhood could stop by, attracted by the live music. Astoria's ethnic diversity has grown enormously in the last decade, especially with a big influx of South Asians. Ladies in colorful saris, pushing strollers with small children, drifted by the park, obviously enjoying the evening. In the park itself, a few Asian- and Hispanic-Americans were mixed in with the Italian-Americans, and there were a fair number of young people.
An outdoor performance such as this allows for a very interesting bleed between audience and the greater community. Yes, there is the "audience," sitting and listening, or dancing. But there is a greater number of people, like myself, enjoying the experience as part of the evening in Astoria. There's no pressure to join the crowd, as one can participate from across the street, just by giving a few moments of one's attention. That open quality allows for a greater kind of community involvement, as people from other ethnic or cultural groups can partake with no pressure to join or identify. The result is that kind of harmony that comes from different groups respectfully being aware of each others' presence in the neighborhood and community; I believe that is one of the goals many of us have as artists and as administrators of public art.
James Bau Graves, in his excellent book Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose (click for the link), talks about the different audiences/communities involved in any cultural enterprise. He sees three main groups in all communities: the die-hards, the ordinary participants, and the periphery. The first group is the smallest: those who are passionately dedicated to the activities or values of this particular group (in our case, to a particular art-form or genre). That would include the professional practitioners of it, as well as the hard-core audience members who know every detail about the history of the performers or artists involved, who know every song, or every poem, or every painting. Around them is a much larger group of interested participants, who can be counted on to attend events, and who bring in others by word of mouth. And around them is an even larger group of people who are only very occasionally involved. These are people who have come to perhaps only one event. Or these are people who used to be die-hard fans, but who gave up and left the group. Or these are people who only just heard about the community, or the artist, for the first time today, and who have a passing interest that might bring them to the next event.
Graves's very interesting argument is that this third, largest group, is as essential to the sustenance of the community as are the other two groups. He sees communities as constantly in flux, with people moving back and forth among these three categories. The periphery category is the one that allows for contact with other communities, for expansion, for constant re-invigoration of the community of fans and die-hard members. Without the periphery, the center would fall apart.
Since reading that a few years ago, I've actually seen one way that this kind of thing plays out: I'm a regular teacher at a world music and dance camp, called Lark Camp, that happens in Mendocino, California, in August of every year. It's been going on for 30 years now, and it is one of several other yearly camps in the area, including a Balkan music camp, a Middle-East music camp, and a camp for musicians just to get together and jam. At Lark Camp, approximately 60-80 teachers of all different genres of music from all over the world each offer two hours of classes that the approximately 800 participants can drop in on whenever they like, or take for the entire week if they are so inclined. There are many musicians who have learned a little bit about many different kinds of music. There are masters of one tradition who have decided to become students in another. The whole range of professionals and amateurs mix and play with each other at Lark Camp.
The result, I have found, is that the communities of professionals in specific genres of music know those practicing other genres much more so than they do here, on the East Coast, where we don't have such a rich camp selection. Another result is that the community of amateurs and dilettantes in Northern California is much stronger musically, and a much larger group, than those out here. They meander among different groups, and then every once in a while some of them stay in one group and become masters. The fluidity and flux of people back and forth among different communities of musicians strengthens all of those communities, and has led to the building of a much larger community encompassing all of them. It is that third group that Graves talks about, the periphery, that makes all of this possible, and that leads to a wider appreciation for world music in the broader society, in Northern California.
Outdoor public arts events, like Italian Nights, contribute something very important to community growth in these terms, then. They allow for an expansion of the periphery in ways that indoor events simply do not. The straight-ahead "audience" might be the same for an indoor event as for an outdoor event, but the periphery for an outdoor event is orders of magnitude larger.
We at the Queens Council on the Arts had a similar experience this summer with our Live at the Gantries outdoor concert series, on the river in Long Island City. Audiences grew every week, but even more interestingly, audiences grew over the course of a single performance, as passers-by and residents of the nearby apartment buildings joined the crowd. Those on the piers, watching the stunning sunsets over Manhattan, were part of the peripheral audience as well, as they enjoyed the lovely summer evenings in Long Island City. And because our concert series was tremendously diverse from week to week in terms of different ethnic musics, we created an overlap of many different communities in the audiences, which consisted of a mix of people who came that particular week because they were specifically interested in Irish music, or Japanese punkrock, or Mexican dance, or whatever; and audience members who came to see or hear something different, or because they were in the neighborhood.
I'm addressing this post, in part, to applicants to the Queens Community Arts Fund who are thinking about what "community involvement" means in terms of their own projects. I'd like to encourage such applicants, particularly those who are applying for the NYSCA individual artist grant, which requires some kind of community involvement in the creation or development of the new work of art, to think about the issues I've raised here, and to consider the possibility of doing some event outdoors.
The more outdoor events we have, the more public visibility we give to the arts, and the more we expand the community of ordinary New Yorkers who, even though they may not be active audiences for the arts, have been touched once or twice by a lovely event on a lovely evening... and who may start to see the value of the arts in their lives, through those special moments.