AVANT-GARDE SERIES RENEWED : ‘OFF CENTER’ ALIVE FOR A 2ND PBS YEAR

If making it on television means being renewed for a second season, artists once considered to be in the avant-garde are about to enter the mainstream.

“Alive From Off Center,” a public television series showcasing some of the country’s leading performing and video artists, proved so popular with critics and television audiences during its premiere eight-week season last summer that it is returning for a second season, starting Monday (10 p.m., Channel 28).

The expanded 10-week series of half-hour programs consists of 17 videos representing contemporary artists working in music, dance, theater, comedy and video art from around the world. They include performance artist Laurie Anderson, choreographer Trisha Brown, mime/juggler/illusionist Michael Moschen, video artist Skip Blumberg, satirist William Wegman, and film maker Charles Atlas.

“Artists today are interested in using the language of popular culture to reach broader audiences, and there is an audience out there that is ready for this kind of art,” said Melinda Ward, the mastermind behind the series and its executive producer, in explaining how the video revolution has helped bridge the gap between the avant-garde and the mainstream.

“Up until this series, we have had little opportunity to see this kind of work, even on public television which has tended to be conservative,” Ward said in a telephone interview from her office at KTCA-TV, the Minneapolis/St. Paul public television station where the series’ two seasons have been produced. She pointed out that 65% of last season’s audience for the series was found to be under the age of 50, an unusually high figure for this age group among public television’s traditional audience.

Ward said a confluence of events, as well as encouragement from public television’s national programming department “where they now see a need for this kind of programming in the schedule,” led to the series.

“We happened to hit a moment in time when it was possible to make such a series happen,” Ward said. She cited the popularity of music videos, the interest on the part of contemporary artists to work with video and interest by the Minneapolis station to pool its resources for a major arts series.

She was also willing to move on to KTCA to produce the series, after a long tenure at Minneapolis’ Walker Arts Center where she became familiar with and met many of the artists on the cutting edge.

“Minneapolis and the Walker Art Center are very contemporary centers,” said Ward, a former New Yorker, adding, “many of the biggest stars in this constellation, such as Twyla Tharp, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass . . . have shown their work here before taking it to New York.”

According to Ward, funds for the first season’s $600,000 budget came from public television, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and private foundations. She said, however, that only one of the eight shows in last summer’s season was originally produced for the series, as compared to 14 out of the 17 videos scheduled to be seen this season.

She said the upcoming $1.2 million season again has been funded by PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts, in addition to the Rockefeller Foundation. There were also co-production deals with Los Angeles’ KCET on a Trisha Brown video directed by film maker Jonathan Demme, and with Boston’s WGBH on a Laurie Anderson video that is scheduled to conclude the second season Sept. 1.

Noting the enthusiasm of the contemporary artists, Ward said, “Video artists see this as an opportunity to work in new ways, on a larger scale, often in collaboration with other artists--and know that their work will be seen. And performing artists who have been wanting to work in video now have an opportunity to do so.”