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SPECIAL
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| CULTURE KLATCH By Sally Kirby Hartman |
Leah
Waitzer's cultural calendar is jammed for spring.
Within a 30-day span, the Norfolk resident is
seeing the Russian Ballet, Boys Choir of Harlem,
Miami String Quartet, Ballet Hispanico, the
National Symphony with conductor Leonard Slatkin
and the Orion String Quartet. Waitzer is also
treating her grandchildren to a performance of
"Peter and the Wolf" by the Virginia
Symphony and Spectrum Puppets. She and her
husband will attend gala events surrounding a
major glass exhibit at several area museums. |
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| Waitzer is soaking
up all this culture without leaving Hampton Roads
-- thanks to the Virginia Waterfront
International Arts Festival. |
 The Russian Ballet at last year's Virginia International Arts Festival. |
The festival started three years ago as part of a regional tourism campaign devised to bring visitors to Hampton Roads during the spring off-season. Armed with a $25,000 grant from the Norfolk Southern Foundation, a small staff spent 18 months planning the first 18-day event in 1997. Humorist Garrison Keillor and pianist Victor Borge were in the line-up at the inaugural festival, which had a $2 million budget but ended the year in a hole. The second year, violinist Itzhak Perlman and entertainer Harry Belafonte headlined 36 diverse performances, and the festival made a profit of $38,000. The event also has started an endowment with The Norfolk Foundation to guarantee its permanency on the region's cultural agenda. |
This year the festival has a $2.8 million budget underwritten by numerous corporations. It has expanded to 30 days of performances that started April 9 and run through May 9. New this year is a fringe festival of performances by local groups as well as a visual art display. In a collaborative effort, some of the world's best-known glass artists have installed exhibits at The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk and the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia in Virginia Beach. Related glass displays are drawing visitors to 10 other museums and art centers throughout the region.
Conceived as a truly regional event, the festival's dancers, musicians and performers take to stages as diverse as the Norfolk Botanical Garden and Williamsburg Regional Library, as well as main stages at Chrysler Hall in Norfolk and the GTE Virginia Beach Amphitheater. Schools and churches in eight cities also play host to festival events. While the featured artists change each year, one event is always in the schedule -- the Virginia International Tattoo, where 600 performers march in precision while playing music.
Rob Cross, the festival's executive director, says "our greatest challenge is transportation." The logistics of managing a festival spread out over eight localities can be trying. As Cross strives to give the arts festival the status of Charleston's Spoleto Festival USA, he envies the South Carolina festival's compact venue -- about eight square blocks.
But for festival devotees like Waitzer, who buys tickets for about 75 percent of festival events each year, having events in various cities "doesn't stop me. What's the difference if I drive to downtown Norfolk or through the tunnel to Portsmouth? The festival helps promote regionalism."
While the festival helps attract tourists from far and wide, an economic impact study conducted by Old Dominion University last year showed that 88 percent of the festival's 73,000 spectators lived in Hampton Roads. Their buying clout meant the festival's economic impact on the region was $5.6 million, with tickets, lodging and meals accounting for most of the expenditures.
As a Norfolk native and an arts lover, Waitzer is thrilled that "we don't have to take a backseat to any community. In the past few years we have developed and matured culturally."
© May 1999, Media General Business Communications, Inc.
publisher of Virginia Business Magazine