FirstWorks festival to be expanded in 2015

PUTTING IN WORK: The pilot FirstWorks Festival on the Plaza in 2012 was supported with a $200,000 creative-place-making award and drew an audience of 40,000 into downtown Providence. The organization is planning to make it a biennial festival. / COURTESY EHSUN MIRZA
PUTTING IN WORK: The pilot FirstWorks Festival on the Plaza in 2012 was supported with a $200,000 creative-place-making award and drew an audience of 40,000 into downtown Providence. The organization is planning to make it a biennial festival. / COURTESY EHSUN MIRZA

FirstWorks is planning a biennial festival at Kennedy Plaza in Providence set for next June that organizers hope will be successful enough to provide a recurring economic and cultural boost to the city.
A Sept. 20 downtown festival helped celebrate the nonprofit’s 10th anniversary. It also served as a kickoff for the larger biennial celebration that will take advantage of renovations now underway to turn the plaza commuter hub into more of a civic space.
“It’s not just about coming to experience a performance,” said Kathleen Pletcher, founder and executive artistic director of FirstWorks. “It’s about coming to experience a city.”
The 2015 celebration will be similar to the FirstWorks Festival on the Plaza in 2012 that attracted 40,000 people downtown and involved more than 18 partner organizations, Pletcher said. Thirty-two percent of those attending that festival were visitors from out of state, she said.
Such visitors typically spend money locally, though the city didn’t do an economic-impact study of the 2012 celebration.
“Essentially, what we’re doing now is an expansion of what we did in 2012,” Pletcher said. “It’s not different, so much as incorporating lessons learned and partnerships.
“We’re connecting publicity and cross-promotion with other organizations,” said Pletcher. “You think of WaterFire, the [Rhode Island School of Design Museum]. As visitors or residents come into downtown, they’re getting a sense of all the cultural assets downtown. That’s one of the benefits of this web of partnerships [and] one of the strongest parts of our work as a catalyst.”
Catalyzing community building (artists also do workshops in the schools) may happen through arts and culture programming, but even with funding to support it, leaders in Providence and the nonprofit world acknowledge its impact as an economic driver has not necessarily been demonstrated, though there are anecdotal examples that it functions in part that way.
“This kind of a festival, and what happened in 2012 … allow people to understand what kind of a space Kennedy Plaza could potentially be, as a central square for gathering, for celebration and bringing people together, much like a European piazza or plaza,” said Lynne McCormack, director of Providence’s department of Art, Culture and Tourism. According to FirstWorks’ online promotional information for the 2015 event, for which McCormack said major acts are not yet booked, the festival will resemble the “multistage spectacle” that drew 40,000 people in 2012.
Two years ago, the free festival included a WaterFire lighting and a mix of music, dance and performance in Kennedy Plaza. There was a strolling Papermoon Puppet Theater performance from Indonesia; Red Baraat, a nine-piece ensemble of North Indian music fused with funk, go-go, Latin, and jazz; the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra and a ballet, among other shows.
Next year, the footprint of activity will be expanded to include arts installations along Washington Street, to where it intersects with the Providence Public Library on Empire Street, McCormack said.
The Kennedy Plaza redesign that began in July and will continue through the fall delayed the biennial festival until next year, McCormack said.
A $200,000 NEA “Our Town” grant the city won enabled it to host the pilot festival in 2012, McCormack explained. In 2013, the city won another $75,000 from the NEA to help establish that original FirstWorks Festival on the Plaza as a biennial event, she said.
The intent was to create a downtown “cultural corridor” that enveloped not only Kennedy Plaza but also Washington Street, home to AS220’s Mercantile Block and Dreyfus Building, as well as Trinity Repertory Company, she said.
According to Pletcher, FirstWorks also this past spring received a $150,000 grant from the Rhode Island Foundation for operating expenses, half of which is earmarked to help FirstWorks establish the biennial festival. Providence has been planning for activities leading up to that festival and will host a planning charrette on Sept. 23, McCormack said.
The sense is that downtown “could become a much more cohesive, vibrant, pedestrian-friendly space,” she said.
Pletcher; Laurie White, president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce; and Daniel Baudouin, executive director of the Providence Foundation, say there can be tangible economic benefits to these festivals, though the long-term impact and intangible benefits are harder to gauge. “People come here,” said Baudouin. “They spend money, and that helps. … They eat in restaurants. They shop. The money they bring in helps sustain businesses. There are more people here. WaterFire gets a lot of people overnight. And people who come here may come back.”
“Through our partnership with the Providence Tourism Council and Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau, we are creating packages for hotels and restaurants and using this to build awareness of all of Providence’s cultural assets,” Pletcher explained. “The linkages we have with WaterFire sort of ‘ups’ the creative capital.”
Indeed, the city was branded the “creative capital” in 2010, a moniker that has some sticking power but also has not been supported by marketing funding recently, said McCormack.
In the meantime, the U.S. Army Corps recently studied the economic impact of WaterFire and found it created more than 1,200 direct and indirect jobs, Baudouin said, as well as bringing in visitors who stay in hotels, eat in restaurants and shop.
No such study of the FirstWorks Festival on the Plaza exists, in part because of a lack of funding to pay for it, McCormack added.
However, in fiscal 2010, Americans for the Arts in Washington, D.C., found that there was about $191 million in direct and indirect spending in Providence as a whole, not just downtown, attributed to nonprofit arts and culture groups and their audiences, she noted.
White said she’s “not aware of businesses putting down roots in Providence because they want to be co-located with events in the ‘public square.’ ” At the same time, she added, more activity and the international appeal of performances help lure sponsors and the public downtown.
“I think it’s clear Providence has distinguished itself as a place that is welcoming to arts events, particularly those with a cosmopolitan flair, and that [Rhode Island’s] students would be natural consumers of this kind of public activity,” she said. “In future years, as Kennedy Plaza re-imagines itself, I think you’ll see even more activity.” •

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