Cultural Organizations Talk Impact on Berkshire County
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Cultural institutions are recovering from the pandemic and feel their success is interconnected.
Local professionals gathered at the Barrington Stage Company on Thursday morning for a "Networking Before 9" breakfast hosted by the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Pittsfield Inc.
Situated in the theater's Wolfson Center on North Street, they heard about the cultural sector's impact on Berkshire County in peak season and throughout the year.
Artistic Director Alan Paul reported that Barrington Stage attracts roughly 50,000 visitors to Pittsfield and the surrounding area every summer.
"To feel what happens when we have a show going on down the street at eight o'clock at night, the streets fill up and I feel very much a proud part of being a part of this community and what happens really on the street, on North Street and around town," he said.
The chamber holds a few breakfasts a year to highlight local places that people may not have been to on their own. Executive Director Betsy Andrus explained that they want people to get a little more understanding of what is right in their back yard.
"We do like camps, nursing homes, and administrative offices and just unusual locations," she said.
"The topic is always different. Our programs committee looks at where we are, who is in the area, who is the host, and kind of comes up with, if relevant, a topic in that line or something that's really relevant today. We always have three guest speakers, people that are involved in the same topic but have different perspectives."
During the event, certificates or recognition were given to BSC for its 30th anniversary, the Lee Chamber of Commerce for its 100th anniversary, and the Pittsfield Co-operative Bank (the event sponsor) for its 135th anniversary.
Barrington Stage Company owns five buildings in Pittsfield and Paul explained that it has a lot more than theatrical programming.
"The education department at the theater is as robust as what happens on the stages and one program I have been really moved by is called the Playwright Mentoring Project where young people in high school around the county, in North Adams, and in Pittsfield, are brought together between October and April and they're paired with peer mentors and they tell their story, and those stories are turned into plays," he said.
"Not only is it a form of self-expression but it's a forum for them to discuss the things that are the biggest challenges in their lives and having seen this now for two years, it's unbelievable what these young people are going through specific to this community but also specific to just being young people now, which I think is far more complicated than when I was a young person."
The theater company brings more than 200 seasonal and year-round jobs to the area and Paul said many people who come here for the summer stay in the community, which is a testament to life in the Berkshires.
The theater sector supports nearly 4,000 area jobs in the summer.
"We're thrilled to be a part of it and I think that we can all work together in an even more substantive way as we think about the future and we'll all grow together," he said.
Director of Jacob's Pillow Pamela Tatge said the performing arts center will be 93 years old this summer.
"Longest running dance festival in the United States, only national historic landmark dedicated to dance but most of all, we are a beacon for the dance field, for dancers all across the world who want to make it to Jacobs Pillow because it is the place to train to have your debut as a company," she said.
"And it's really a privilege to be that place, particularly in a time that has been really challenging for the arts."
She said, "it's taken a lot to come back" postpandemic but was happy to report that the center has finally exceeded 2019 ticket sales.
In 2020, the Becket campus had a major setback when the Doris Duke Studio Theatre burned to the ground. Tatge said the dance company has been raising money and rebuilding the theater.
"And if all goes well, we will open in July of next summer, the new Doris Duke Theater," she said.
The company has created its first community engagement department that aims to build reciprocal relationships with the community and has begun work to diversify its audience, Tatge said, "largely through relationship building with organizations which bring social constituencies."
"We have a long way to go but we've started. It's very difficult to gage how we're doing in younger audiences but one of the things we did was really tag things as family-friendly and that really, we observably could see that more families attended this past summer," she continued.
"In terms of our demographics, one-third of our audiences come from the Berkshires, either as residents year-round or second homeowners. One-third make a day trip, so are about an hour to two hours away, and the other third is coming from far and wide, great international, we are on people's bucket lists to come to."
But Jacob's Pillow needs to increase its earned revenue.
"The challenge for all of us is that costs are rising. We can only raise ticket prices so much or we become exclusive and privileged and we don't want to do that so it's all about diversifying earned revenue and contributed income. You may not know that only 35 percent of our income comes from earned revenue, the rest has to come from contributions every year. We start with zero and we build that bucket up," she said.
"Many of you are supporters in the room and I really thank you for all you do to support the cultural organizations here. We are in it together to create Western Mass, this region, as a destination and we really need each other. We are we are wrapped up in each other's destiny."
Laurence Oberwager, director of Tanglewood Business Partners, said an economic impact study showed that Tanglewood spent $62 million in the Berkshires in 2017.
"We have hundreds of summer employees. The total [Boston Symphony Orchestra] employment is 1,200, about 60 percent of those are summer employees at Tanglewood and given inflation, it's likely that we're pushing a quarter of a million dollars now in economic impact the Berkshire County overall," he said.
"From restaurants to hotels to the building and design trades are absolutely driven by the second-homeowner community, which is centered on the cultural Berkshires."
Anecdotally, he said there are more families with children on the lawn each summer since the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We all know that there was a tremendous influx of New York people who bought real estate in the Berkshires and brought their professional lives here because they could work remotely," Oberwager said.
"They are becoming the next generation that is going to Barrington Stage and Tanglewood and the Pillow and the Clark Art Institute and on and on and I think that will only continue."
Laura Brennan, assistant director and economic development program manager for the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission, agreed that cultural organizations' destinies are wrapped up together.
"It's what we believe at Berkshire Regional Planning Commission. It's how I try to live my work every day," she said.
She spoke about ArtWeek Berkshires, a countywide, crowd-sourced, more than a weeklong festival that has been going on since 2021.
"We picked up where a statewide version of an art festival left off at the beginning of COVID because we were not giving up on the idea of shining the spotlight on individual artists and what they contribute to the creative economy," Brennan explained.
"The model is basically that anybody of any discipline or experience level can sign up, from large institutions to people working out of their basements or garages who want to share their work with the broader world. There's no fee for an artist to register for art week. They can just simply sign up for one event for one hour on one day of the festival, or they can offer multiple opportunities for people to engage with their work."
She said it is a business opportunity for artists but also a way for the public to understand how much of an undercurrent of arts and culture exists alongside and intertwined with large anchor institutions.
The powerhouses behind ArtWeek Berkshires are the five cultural districts designed in Berkshire County: Williamstown, North Adams, Pittsfield's Up Street Cultural District, Lenox, and downtown Great Barrington. They partner with BRPC and 1Berkshire to present the festival each year.
About 100 artists participated in the last event and there were nearly 200 events throughout.
"We had participation in 16 out of the 32 municipalities in Berkshire County last year," Brennan reported.
"And through the really relatively modest budget that ArtWeek holds together through the contributions of those five cultural districts, they achieved just in digital marketing nearly 575,000 impressions in that aspect of the marketing investment."
The festival will run from May 16 through May 26, 2025, and will encompass two weekends — including Memorial Day weekend.
"We would love to see this be more of a community effort in that we would have lodging properties and restaurants and other entities be a part of this by having it be a reason to build a lodging package or restaurants and the creative work that chefs do can certainly be something that is put on display during ArtWeek," Brennan said.
"It does not need to be visual art or performing arts and so we encourage really out-of-the-box thinking in that regard as well."
The event was catered by After Hours, a pop-up mobile restaurant.
Tags: anniversary, cultural economy, networking, Southern Berkshire Chamber,
