Expanding arts' appeal to LI's young patrons

BY ALAN INKLES | Alan Inkles is director of the Staller Center for the Arts

July 29, 2007

Last Sunday, Newsday's editorial page opined that to keep young people on Long Island we need to ensure that there's a thriving cultural scene here. So how are we doing?

In many respects, rather well. Arts centers and theaters are popping up all over the Island. Museums and art galleries are plentiful, from end to end, and arts councils in both counties are encouraging and supporting programs in all of the arts.

But are the arts institutions we have here actually resonating with the young residents the Island so desperately wants to attract?

For several years in the mid '90s, I attended the annual Arts Presenters Conference in New York City. There, colleagues of mine would discuss the problem of the graying of our audiences as well as other issues about trying to develop new patrons for the arts.

As the years went by, and the discussions continued without solutions, I began to look around the room and think, we also have to be concerned about the graying of arts presenters. We, too, were getting older. And if we stood any chance of attracting younger audiences, we had to begin to think young and act young. Some of us have succeeded, but many have struggled, and other arts centers have had to close their doors.

Long Island has a lot in common with many other suburban areas as far as our arts centers, museums and other cultural centers are concerned. But our close proximity to New York City bestows Long Island presenters and promoters with unique challenges. We are a next-door neighbor to the arts mecca of the world, where you can attend almost any sort of cultural program on any given night. There are patrons who regularly attend programs in the city, those who go in occasionally, and those who never go to Manhattan to see anything.

My colleagues on Long Island all have to produce our events with this knowledge, and we continue to search for and create programs that can withstand the cultural magnet that pulls audiences west.

As a result, both Tilles Center on the C.W. Post Campus in Nassau County and Staller Center at Stony Brook University in Suffolk, the two long-standing arts centers on Long Island, have expanded programs to reach wider audiences - and to train younger folks to stay on the Island once in a while (or more often) for their dose of culture.

This year, Staller will introduce a new program that will provide all incoming Stony Brook students with a complimentary ticket to the program of their choice. Tilles Center has one of the largest and most dedicated education programs in the country. Other important and vibrant cultural organizations on Long Island, including The Long Island Philharmonic, the Boulton Center in Bay Shore, Friends of the Arts in Oyster Bay and others, have all developed programs to enlighten and entertain the next generation of arts lovers.

But addressing our "graying" concern is not enough. We all know that there is a funding crisis for the arts, and every Long Island arts organization is scrambling to find new ways to raise dollars. And we're finding that the old model of ensuring financial support - selling subscription series - doesn't exactly fit with the way Long Islanders live today.

So in addition to creating programs that will interest a young audience, we have to find a way to present them so that parents can squeeze them into weekends filled with travel soccer games, lacrosse tournaments, dance rehearsals, piano lessons and ... well, you get the picture. Although many patrons still purchase season tickets for performances up to a year in advance, many arts centers and theaters on the Island are now offering "flex" or "create your own series" packages aimed at audience members in their 30s and 40s, who are raising school-age children. These packages allow for greater flexibility in purchasing, have liberal exchange policies and provide the ability to purchase tickets closer to the performance date.

Informing people about these options and the programs that go with them is its own challenge. The goal is to get the word out and then to get people in the seats. But marketing is difficult when there are so many communities spread out across such a great distance. Still, on any given day, Long Island has as much to offer in the arts as many large cities.

The key to developing new audiences for all of our venues on Long Island in this Netflix era of entertainment is the creativity of the arts programmers, presenters and producers. Certainly the works vary at different venues; one would expect a production by a renowned theater group at Tilles or Staller Center to be of a higher caliber - and ticket price - than a play presented by one of our fine Long Island University's theater arts departments.

The choices are there, and most Long Islanders who are looking for culture can and will be able to find these programs and decide what works for them.

How, though, do we reach the hundreds of thousands of Long Islanders who aren't attending programs but who might if they were prodded a bit? We know that Nassau Coliseum, Jones Beach and the North Fork Theatre at Westbury do quite well with their popular entertainment programs. And many of our arts centers have added more popular programming into their performing arts seasons.

The Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center has expanded its summer season to year-round eclectic entertainment, Bay Street Theatre has added a comedy series, and Tilles and Staller Center programs look very different today than they did even 10 years ago. Seasons that used to be heavily steeped in the classics in music and dance have broadened to include jazz, cabaret, musicals, world music and family programming, in order to attract a more diverse audience.

To compete with ready-made forms of entertainment and the lure of instant messaging, TiVo and 250 cable channels, arts organizations must be at the top of their games. We need to listen to what Long Island's youth are interested in. Why not bring in an exciting dance company from The Netherlands that is classically trained but that specializes in break dancing, skateboarding, hip-hop and other popular forms of dance? Or how about a new-wave opera company that re-works the classic arias from 250 years ago and performs them in amazing rock and roll treatments?

Finally, we need to insist that artists performing on Long Island enhance their programs with pre-concert talks and meet-and-greet sessions. These events should be as interactive as our children's Xbox games. We must excite audiences from the first time they hear about a particular program in newspaper listings and on radio and television promotions. Our brochures and printed materials need to be targeted to a generation that's become accustomed to browsing instead of reading.

If we work as an arts community with integrity for what we put on our stages, screens and in our galleries, if we make it accessible to all and work with our community resources to get the word out, I am very confident that the arts will continue to flourish on Long Island and attract the many generations to come.