Isn't this show a rerun?

No Performing Arts Center for Bozeman — Again

By Marjorie Smith, Unfiltered 1-10-06

The Bozeman Chronicle reported Tuesday news that many of us have been expecting and yet dreading

This soggy, dreary January day is a long way from that exuberant hot Friday the 13th in June, 2003, when we -- a large flock of Bozeman’s culture vultures – stood in the sun in the parking lot at Tracy and Mendenhall and watched Dick Clotfelter unveil his plans. Most of us were positively giddy that day. Everything suddenly seemed so possible!

Two and a half years later, Bozeman is still very short of performance venues. We’ve got the performers – the oldest professional opera company in the state (and, I believe, several neighboring states), an excellent symphony orchestra, a ballet that’s been using a live orchestra for its “Nutcracker�? for many years, roughly ten community theatre companies – but it’s very hard to find a place to perform. We’ve got the audiences. What we haven’t got is the money – or the rich donors -- to build a performing arts center worthy of all the creativity and talent we’re surrounded by.

At least that’s what Clotfelter seems to have concluded and I fear he’s probably right. People have been talking about a performing arts center – and many of them working very hard to get something going – for most of the 22 years since I moved back to Bozeman. But the Intermountain Opera is still presenting its elaborate productions on the cramped stage at the Willson, a 1930s high school auditorium. The symphony and ballet are still there, too, everybody negotiating and juggling the dates left over after the school system plugs in its calendar.

I once heard a theory that a town Bozeman’s size had the philanthropic resources for only one major cultural building, and the Museum of the Rockies got there first. With all the ritzy trophy homes constructed around the valley and in the canyons in the years since the Museum opened its impressive facility, many of us hoped that there was enough money floating around to build us a dream center. Apparently not.

It’s true that Bozeman voters recently approved a bond issue to renovate the high school, build a new middle school, and build a high school auditorium. Perhaps we can reformat our dreams and go back to the days when architects working with the performing arts center committee of the day were proposing major renovations to the Willson Auditorium that were scuttled by the schools’ continued need for the facility. But with construction costs escalating wildly, who knows if the new high school auditorium will actually get built?

This being Bozeman, there were lots of skeptics concerning the Arts at City Center project. There were those who assumed Clotfelter had a hidden agenda and was up to no good. There were also those who questioned the size of his project – a 1600 seat main theatre – and wondered how many local presenters could afford to use it. Some people argued that whatever money was available should be put into the auditorium at the Emerson Cultural Center (a smaller, older theater than the Willson). Others thought the top priority for donor dollars should be saving the Ellen, the small historic movie theatre on Main Street recently purchased by Montana TheatreWorks, (with the help of local philanthropists).

In Tuesday’s Chronicle article, Clotfelter places part of the blame for the failure of Arts at City Center on the city’s slowness in approving the parking garage that Clotfelter considered a key part of the project. He also says a December editorial in the Chronicle that reacted with the same surprise many of us felt when Clotfelter turned in his bill for his expenses in developing the garage had scared away a major donor.

I’m not sure anyone is really to blame for the fact that we won’t get our fancy cultural center in the heart of the city. We are growing like mad here in the Bozone but maybe we’re not that big yet. Maybe we never will be.

But it’s one of the things that makes Bozeman Bozeman – our dreams have always been as big as the sky.

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