Herding Cats in a Cultural Community

By Marjorie Smith, 5-03-06

For several years, I’ve been teasing my friend Bonnie about her attempts to herd cats. Last week, I think I saw how it can be done. What you need is an outsider to play the role of a bureaucrat (or dog).

The cats Bonnie Sachatello-Sawyer has been trying to herd are Bozeman area artists and cultural organizations. For five years, she has been working at organizing something now known as the Bozeman Cultural Council. It all started when Bill Bryan, who runs the Off the Beaten Track travel agency, and George Keremedjev, founder of the American Computer Museum, were brainstorming about how to get Bozeman known as a community remarkable for its arts and cultural facilities, rather than its just being seen as a great jumping off place for fishing trips and tours of Yellowstone Park.

Bonnie is always up for a good challenge. She recently founded a consulting organization called Hopa Mountain, Inc. that matches resources with needs in rural and tribal communities. She started putting together a board of directors for a cultural council. For the first few years it looked to some of us like an organization all dressed up in its 501(3)c non-profit outfit still looking for some place to go. In 2003 Bonnie’s group put out a beautifully designed and printed calendar that listed 12 months’ worth of cultural events in the Bozeman area, but it was like pulling those proverbial hen’s teeth to get the necessary information. I helped gather it and knew the problems from both sides. Once you’ve listed the dates of the Sweet Pea Festival, the symphony performances, the Intermountain Opera and the Nutcracker, you’re down to bullying other presenters to set dates and list production titles long before their future is fully planned. I begged and bullied people to put something down so that the final product – the calendar – would reflect the area’s vibrant cultural life. But any presenter who had to postpone or cancel events after the calendar was printed vowed never to list anything that far ahead again.

The cultural council downscaled and issued less elaborate brochures for the next couple years -- a few photos of some past performances plus contact info for various groups. But they never really solved the problem of getting the brochures into the hands of tourists who might like to watch a play or hear some unexpectedly accomplished music during their stay in the Bozeman area.

In the meantime, people kept coming on the board and then (like me) dropping off because they couldn’t quite figure out what the group was trying to accomplish or what they could contribute to it. A perceived need for a centralized calendar remained on the tip of many tongues. They thought a calendar could keep cultural organizations from competing with each other for people’s attention. More than once I dragged out the story told to me years ago by Ann Bates, the founder of Montana Ballet, after she tried to start a master calendar for cultural events. What she discovered was that when other organizations saw that Montana Ballet would be presenting a concert on a certain date, they’d say, “Oh, good, let’s have our wingding that day. Nobody goes to the ballet.”

A few months ago, Bonnie hit upon a brilliant way to get artists and other cultural types to focus on the cultural council concept: she used a small grant to invite all interested cultural types to free lunch meetings. Turnout was impressive. After years of a half a dozen or so people brown bagging it at the Chamber of Commerce, forty people or more gathered at the Emerson Cultural Center for two hours of discussions about culture in our community and how it could be enhanced. We made jokes about starving artists and free food, but I think what really happened was that the meetings became large enough that a critical mass was reached and people felt something really might come out of the discussions.

Bonnie prevailed upon Mary Ellen Wolfe, a professional meeting facilitator, to run the discussions and things started to move. Committees formed and met. Folks already providing cultural calendars via the internet (the Bozone and NewWest) persuaded the group that starting their own online calendar was neither necessary nor practical (although the council is setting up a calendar to schedule dates for fundraisers, hoping to staunch the bleeding to death of local donors — or at least space the bleeding sessions out around the calendar).

One perpetual dilemma is – who would have guessed? – how to fund the council. Should we limit participation in the council’s listserv and calendar project to paying members? Should we limit membership to non-profits? What about individual artists? Profit-making businesses like art galleries? Eventually inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness became the watchword.

Perhaps Bonnie’s biggest achievement was attracting some gung-ho newcomers to the board, and persuading them to serve as officers. Thus it was that last week, the Bozeman Cultural Council had its first meeting under the leadership of the new president, Sheila Hrasky, an artist who recently purchased Bozeman’s oldest contemporary art gallery, Artifacts. She’s joined by Tad Drake of the Montana Outdoor Science School, vice president; Ellie Staley of the Downtown Bozeman Association, secretary; and Nyda Gilbertson of the Classics for Kids Foundation, treasurer. At-large board members include Elizabeth Darrow, art historian and political activist; Brian Skuletich, executive director of the Hatch Festival; Jackie Vick, executive director of the Bozeman Symphony Society and Stephanie Saltine, program assistant at the Emerson Cultural Center. Staying on to assist in the transition are Cyndy Andrus, director of the Bozeman Chamber of Commerce convention and visitors bureau (and member of the Montana Arts Council); Cara Wilder Work, development director of the Equinox Theatre Company; and Bonnie Sachatello-Sawyer.

At that meeting last week, I still sensed a bit of that cat-herding frenzy. Perhaps it’s inevitable when an organization comprises representatives of other organizations. Each person/representative has his own priorities, her own goals, and somehow with artists, it always seems that we’re much more enthused about following our own muses rather than listening to the voice of Mr. Rogers advising us to cooperate with one another. (This seems an appropriate time to drag out once again that marvelous observation by Bozeman lawyer John Frohnmayer, former head of the National Endowment for the Arts: When artists form a firing squad, they tend to stand in a circle.)

But then last week the lady from Missoula arrived to present the after-lunch program for the wary cats (a.k.a the Bozeman Cultural Council). Norma Nickerson, director and principal investigator at the Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research at the University of Montana, had come, she said, to get our advice about a survey that’s being funded by the state bed tax. After introducing the folks with her — David and Mary Sneppenger of MSU, and Cinda Holt, business development specialist for the Montana Arts Council — Nickerson explained the project.

A survey is to be taken of out-of-state tourists in the Bozeman-Livingston area in July and August to learn whether they plan to attend any arts or cultural events while in the state, or if they are just here for our natural wonders. Cinda Holt noted that at present Montana’s travel office only promotes the state’s scenic resources and its outdoor recreation. “We’re afraid it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she said. “We need to prove that a portion of our visitors enjoy cultural events so we can get Travel Montana to promote them.”

Bozeman Cultural Council members were quick to point out the basic flaw in the survey plan. “I know the Equinox – along with most other theatre companies – doesn’t do productions in July and August,” Cara Wilder said. “We concentrate on our theatre camps. So your surveyors won’t findany tourists coming to see plays at the Equinox.” Representatives of other organizations quickly chimed in. No symphony, no opera in the summer. Representatives from Livingston cultural organizations agreed that their offerings were much less complete during the summer. Some summer theatre does go on in Bozeman, true, and lots of music events. Trouble is the theatre at Shakespeare in the Parks, the music at Lunch on the Lawn at the Emerson, and on Thursday nights' Music on Main downtown are free events, paid for through advance fundraising and sponsors, generally from in-state sources. Hard to prove the economic impact, the dollars brought into Montana by those cultural favorites. Dr. Nickerson said she was only allowed to collect data on out-of-state tourists because only money coming in from outside Montana counts. As for the timing of the survey, most out-of-state tourists come to Montana in the summer, and to get a statistically significant survey, it had to be done then.

Of course, we said, there is the Sweet Pea Festival in August. But the survey planners worried that the Sweet Pea folks wouldn’t let their survey takers in during the festival. Sheila Hrasky explained that as a businesswoman, she wouldn’t want surveyors coming into her gallery and asking people where they come from. “That kind of question sends them home, in their minds,” she said. “We want them here, in Bozeman, seriously thinking about buying some art.”

And so it went. The survey folks asked for our suggestions but each suggestion elicited their arguments that it wouldn’t work. No, they couldn’t change the survey period to a time when Bozeman and Livingston are bursting with theatrical productions and serious music concerts. No, they couldn’t include responses from tourists from within Montana. And although she’d selected the Bozeman-Livingston area for her case study, Norma Nickerson didn’t seem to have much idea of the sorts of culture going on. “I’m sorry,” she said, “what does Hatch Fest mean?” (to the utter astonishment of Hatch’s Skuletich along with the rest of the folks in the room who assumed everyone in Montana knew about Bozeman’s film festival-cum-mentoring project now gearing up for its third annual five-day event in October.)

Pretty quickly, I began to sense something new around me. There was a growing sense of frustration with this incursion by big-time bureaucracy. But there was also a burgeoning sense of camaraderie. We were bunching together, united against this outsider. By golly! At last us cats were in a herd!

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