Coloradans may be best-known for their outdoor spirit, but it turns out we’re pretty adventurous indoors, too: A new, federal government survey ranks the state No. 1 in trips to theaters, concert halls and museums.
National Endowment for the Arts data put us significantly ahead of our peers, with nearly 52 percent of adults reporting attendance at live performing arts events, above the national average of 37.4 percent. An even greater number, 59.2 percent, say they went to a visual arts event, topping the country’s total of 39 percent.
The rankings are more impressive, culturally speaking, when broken down into individual categories included in the NEA study. We attend classical concerts, dance performances and nonmusical plays at roughly twice the rate of the country as a whole.
The NEA attributes ticket-buying rates to income and education levels, which are relatively high in Colorado. More significantly, the agency correlates attendance to exposure to the arts in childhood. More than 63 percent here say they went to performance events as kids, while almost 46 percent took lessons in violin, ballet or another art form.
“Once you recite a line of Shakespeare, you are hooked for life,” said Jeremy Shamos, board chair for Curious Theatre Company, which has an aggressive youth outreach program that includes a workshop for aspiring teen playwrights.
The NEA’s 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts sampled more than 37,000 adults, counting fine arts offerings such as classical music, theater and art museums, and discounting pop concerts, sporting events and anything taking place at elementary and high schools. Colorado also scored best in the areas of outdoor arts festivals, such as craft fairs, and second in visits to buildings, monuments and neighborhoods for design or historic purposes.
The results are “validating,” according to Jennifer K. Nealson, who heads marketing for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, one of the country’s largest regional theater companies.
She suggests they are rooted in a combination of high-quality institutional organizations, many with national reputations, and a local enthusiasm for arts, which she labels Colorado’s “creative culture.” The DCPA’s own research shows that 69 percent of families in the region have attended its shows in the past 10 years.
“We have a high penetration in the marketplace, and we’re always trying to find new ways to make things accessible to audiences,” she said.
Colorado? Really?
Still, the broad range of the attendance figures can appear surprising to both arts patrons and presenters. Classical fans spend plenty of evenings in half-empty halls. The dance community knows the number of credible, contemporary companies has dropped significantly here in recent years.
Then there are the ever-present pleas from arts companies, who emphasize the negatives, low funds and fluctuating ticket sales in their campaigns to lure private and public contributions to their cause.
But this is a large state, with a lot of diverse offerings, and the numbers make more sense when you look at Colorado as an arts ecosystem linking everything from its unique geography to its philanthropic habits, its startup spirit to a public arts funding system that values connecting kids to culture.
The Rocky Mountains are home to large-scale classical and dance festivals, in Aspen, Vail and other places, that draw sizable crowds over the summer.
The state’s year-round cultural offerings, once holed up in urban zones, have expanded generously, making the arts more widely accessible. In 2012, for example, new performing art centers in Parker and Lone Tree had their first full years. Both were immediately successful.
The state also boasts a quantity of entrepreneurial arts endeavors that do quite well, such as the innovative Classical at Dazzle concert series, which sells out classical music at a jazz nightclub, and the Colorado Bach Ensemble, which debuted in 2012 with a very specific mission of exploring one composer’s music.
Add to that a roster of medium and small arts organizations that score based on their honed stature — the Kirkland Museum in Denver, Central City Opera, and the Creede Repertory Theatre, a tiny company in a remote part of the state that manages to draw 47,000 customers each year.
Getting them young
The real secret to Colorado’s success, though, might be its inclusion of youth into the audience mix, with arts institutions putting increasing emphasis on reaching kids. The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver has gone so far as to make admission free for anyone 18 and under, thanks to underwriting from the David & Laura Merage Foundation, one of several philanthropic organizations that have made the smallest consumers a priority.
For other groups, kids are big business. Schools and community organization get deep discounts at museums and performances and plenty of subsidies if they can’t afford it, but they are paying customers and the arts court them aggressively.
Youth outreach can also reap dividends in public funding. Education efforts weigh heavily for groups who compete for money from the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, which gives out $40 million annually to cultural groups in the seven-county Denver metro area. That’s a rich pot to dip into when you consider that the NEA itself gave out just $146 million across all 50 states in 2012.
“The SCFD really emphasizes youth outreach, and that has made every one pay more attention to it,” said Desiree Parrott-Alcorn, who has worked marketing at a number of groups, including Friends of Chamber Music.
Youth programs aren’t entirely about funding, of course. They’re part of organizations’ missions to serve all segments of the local audience, and Colorado groups do that with diligence and an eye on school curriculum. Colorado Ballet has 60,000 community contacts with kids each year through itsworkshops and performances at schools and other places where families gather. Opera Colorado connects with 35,000 kids annually, not counting regular performances. Does that translate into audiences of the future? The company thinks so. It has maintained an average of 85 percent paid attendance at productions over the past five years. The national average is 62 percent.
Even with the large amount of art available and the youth programs, there seems to remain a certain spirit to the way the state experiences art, and in Colorado style, it can be extreme.
Scores of kids audition for the Denver Young Artists Orchestra each year, even though it means a heavy load of rehearsal time on top of their private lessons and mandatory participation in their own school’s music programs. Tens of thousands of Front Range residents drive over mountains passes for art in high-altitude places like Telluride and Steamboat Springs each summer.
Coloradans can be most responsive when organizations take risks. The MCA routinely sells out its Mixed Taste lecture series, even though it combines talks on such wacky topics as “Cave Painting & Tequila.” The Colorado Symphony orchestra has found some of its greatest success performing music related to comic books and alternative music acts.
In the Denver metro area alone, that enthusiasm provides for 10,000 jobs at arts and cultural organizations and pumps $520 million into the economy annually, according to studies by the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts.
The business committee’s data, no doubt, are meant to bolster support for the arts locally by highlighting Colorado’s cultural zeal. But the NEA’s numbers reinforce the meaning. The federal agency is pro-arts, though its research is statistically sound and doesn’t favor any particular state.
But if you interpret the results broadly, they could give Colorado good reason to invest even more deeply in the arts, said Sunil Iyengar, the NEA chief researcher.
“There would seem to be a sort of bottled-up potential for creative economic development,” he said.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
By the numbers
10,000
Number of jobs at arts and cultural organizations in Denver
$520 million
Amount Denver arts and cultural organizations contribute to the state economy every year
Colorado Business Committee for the Arts
