Column by George Sibley
Mountain Festivals – September 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
ON AUGUST 4TH I went to the Crested Butte Arts Festival, an annual event for which I can say, like Dean Acheson, I was “present at the creation.” Sort of.
I had a special reason for wanting to be there this year; I wanted to catch the afternoon show of the Commedia Del’Arte troupe my son has organized in the valley. I made it in time to do a pass down through the three blocks of display booths, and still be there for the Commedia show by Sam and his five fellow troupers.
The Commedia is raw basic theater. It started in 16th-century Italy as street theater, in which masked, fiscally challenged actors poked careful fun at the world they lived in, in hopes of making people laugh the “ah ha!” (“It’s about that jerk my neighbor”) kind of laugh. The satire strives to inspire the audience to throw a coin rather than to string up the players from the nearest lamp post — which is what would have happened if the players had said the same things seriously from a soapbox.
Americans, of course, are too polite anymore to string anyone up. They’re also generally too polite to laugh in public — since we know it only encourages bad dependencies to throw coins, especially in the direction of artists.
Nonetheless, they had a good crowd in Crested Butte that laughed out loud a number of times, and what the players collected in their hats probably bought dinner and a round. They aren’t trying to live off of this; they all work at one or two other jobs for a living. The Commedia is just a part of their real lives — a part that makes the living worth it.
The Crested Butte Arts Festival began its evolution in 1971 (not 1972 like the Crested Butte News claimed). Like all towns, states, and nations, Crested Butte wants to believe that its past glided smoothly and inexorably into its present — a belief in a kind of invisible guiding hand that’s always helping us move into the future. But the fact that Crested Butte’s first Arts Festival took place in 1971, and this year’s festival is only the 29th festival, rather than the 31st — as it would have been if the festival had run every year — might indicate that the evolution has had its moments of what evolutionists call “punctuated equilibrium.”
And it has definitely had those moments.
The first Arts Festival happened because a guy bought a truckload of railroad ties. This guy also happened to have links to the Austin music scene, which was in its pre-TV vitality, and he decided that we should have an Arts Festival to showcase both Crested Butte’s handful of artists and his friends from Austin, which included unknown wannabes like Townes Van Zandt and Michael Martin Murphey.
Being editor of the local paper at that time, I was a natural for the organizing committee. I was also for anything more newsworthy than who was visiting their second home or who had gone to Gunnison on a business trip.
THE TRUCKLOAD OF RAILROAD TIES, supplemented by poles (later reduced to firewood) and salvaged wood from a couple of terminally sagging historical buildings, went into a strange and somewhat wonderful covered pavilion in which the town’s artists displayed their wares, while the musicians displayed their talents in a vacant lot across the street where they used the concrete lid of the coal cellar of Tony’s Tavern as a stage. It was a mellow, laid-back weekend that was also marked by a higher ratio of visitors than most summer weekends.
The festival was good enough to inspire a second one in 1972, highlighted by the premiere performance of the Crested Butte Mountain Theater, for which I was the “producer.” As producer, I was the guy who bought the boards for the outdoor stage, organized the stage construction, rounded up and mounted the lights, got the REA to run in a power line, et cetera. (All costs were repaid from the proceeds).
Downtown, the number of artists increased considerably, with quite a few visiting artists setting up.
BUT TWO COMPETING IDEAS for the future of this festival were evolving. One was the original visual-arts idea: that the Arts Festival should be about what was going on arts-wise in the Upper Gunnison valley (with a lot of hands-on arts-related activity). The other was the original musical-arts idea: that the festival should be about bringing in artists from all over the place and accumulating an audience for them.
The fact that the same guy launched both of those ideas in 1971 is indicative of nothing more nor less than the kind of cultural schizophrenia hovering over Colorado mountain towns in the second half of the 20th century.
As for me, I was an advocate of the first idea. I personally enjoyed artists, even not very good ones, more than most other kinds of immigrants coming to mountain towns, and thought that a passable future lay in saying: “Look, we want people to come here and try out new ideas for being themselves. And every year, we’ll give you a shot at showing your progress, pilgrim.”
Also because I’d played a fairly big role in the first two festivals, I prevailed in the micropower struggle between the two factions, and was coördinator for the third festival in 1973.
But I still don’t know quite what to say about that third Arts Festival. We (some of us) wanted to show Crested Butte as a happening place — a place where people were living their art, not just selling it — and we succeeded beyond our wildest nightmares.
We had quite a number of artists and would-be artists in Crested Butte at that point, all doing their candles and batik and other things that a less polite age might call “crafts.”
And we had the Mountain Theater, which built an even larger outdoor stage, and had people who had only been actors for a few weeks doing free falls fifteen feet from a guillotine platform in what was probably the most incredible staging of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade that has ever occurred, amateur or professional. For the Christians, we had a production of Godspell from a nearby youth camp.
We also had a wild man who spent his summers carving faces on dead-standing trees out in the woods. He rounded up five other woodbutchers and we bought them a 50-foot spruce log to turn into a totem for the town — it got erected the last day of the festival, and still stands, in its own minipark.
And in addition to the Austin musicians, we had “Jelly” — a jam band made up of a motley of local amateurs and incipient professionals that took extreme liberty in doing and saying and singing everything they couldn’t do, say, or sing anywhere else (because everywhere else they weren’t nearly as naive about musicians as we were).
And because by then some of the Austin names were recognizable in the mass society, a sizable fraction of the masses showed up. Only two or three thousand, but it scared us all to death. Nothing really bad happened, but it was all more than anyone had had in mind. It was something bigger in the ominous way that things tended to get bigger in the late 20th century.
That is why this year’s festival was the 29th rather than the 31st Crested Butte Arts Festival. There was an hiatus. And when the festival started up again, it was as part of a comparatively sedate commercial festival circuit. The new Arts Festival became just another weekend for western artists from elsewhere who spend their summers going from town to town to sell beautiful things to people from elsewhere who buy beautiful things.
THERE’S NOTHING WRONG with that. It’s a good show that gets better every year. This year there were 182 booths by visual artists. But only seven of them were artists from the Upper Gunnison valley. In Central Colorado, Salida seems to have done a better job of realizing Crested Butte’s earlier goal of developing a town full of working artists. Salida’s “Art Walk” brings the “arts consumers” to the artists for a tour of their shops and galleries. What the Upper Gunnison valley seems to be moving toward, on the other hand — as real-estate prices escalate and part-time wealthy people replace full-time working people — is a valley full of arts consumers, to whom we bring the artists once a year.
This year, the percentage of local talent was higher in the performing arts. Four of the ten musical groups performing throughout the weekend were local talent. Young dancers did performances from their local “Dansummer” workshops. The Mountain Theater — now supposedly the longest-running community theater in the state, at 30 unpunctuated years — had a production of “Sylvia.” And there was the brand-new Commedia, out on the street.
“There should be free art!” blusters El Capitano. “Yeah!” echoes Puccinello, who never quite gets it: “Yeah! Free art! Free art!”
George Sibley eventually migrated from Crested Butte to write in Gunnison and teach at Western State College there.