The Club Gets Bigger : Escondido’s arts center joins a number of new suburban performance venues. Is it a cultural vision or just a good intention?

Here the new buildings have that certain comforting California feel to them with their signature curls and curves, great sweeps and serene surfaces, one rising to a landmark 100 feet.

Here is the latest of the brave, new cultural centers that, like weeds and wildflowers, pop up in the most unexpected of places.

Here is the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, designed by late architect Charles Moore of Santa Monica’s Moore Ruble Yudell. The center has been 10 years in the planning and building and, when it opens Oct. 1, there will be $74-million worth of buildings and programs, 12 gardens and an ambitious side-by-side enterprise involving performing and visual arts.

New arts centers are opening this year in Escondido and Thousand Oaks. Last year Cerritos opened its $60-million Cerritos Center for the Arts. Two years ago, an 815-seat Performing Arts facility opened in Poway. Cal State Long Beach has two new performing arts theaters.

Something clearly is stirring in the “hidden” towns and valleys of America.

What Escondido ( Hidden in Spanish) is doing, miles from anybody’s downtown except its own, may prove to be a cultural vision for the future or just another good intention turned fiscal folly.

A 12-acre site in mid-town, a four-minute drive from where the I-5 and Interstate 78 intersect, will house a stately 1,532-seat concert hall with no seat farther than 100 feet from the stage; a 400-seat theater; three art galleries with 9,000 square feet of exhibition space and another 8,000 square feet of studios for visiting artists and students, plus a 9,000-square-foot conference center.

The center will have a $3-million first-year performance budget and $1-million visual arts budget, part of a $6-million annual operating budget, at a time when many arts centers have turned to renting their halls rather than booking whole seasons for them as Escondido is doing.

In its ambitious inaugural eight-month season, the California Center has scheduled star names ranging from Cecilia Bartoli (Oct. 2) to Itzhak Perlman (March 5), from Anna Deavere Smith (Jan. 28) to the Kirov Orchestra (Oct. 8), Mel Torme (March 22) and touring musical companies, a total of 73 performers or groups.

The California Center for the Arts had its origins in the early ‘80s, when Escondido officials decided they needed to bring life into the downtown center. First they built a city hall, completed in 1988, next came the arts center.

Surveys of the million-plus people in north San Diego county found a strong interest in arts and entertainment, especially for events closer than the 30-minute drive to San Diego, the hour drive to Costa Mesa or the two-hour ride to Los Angeles.

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“What we had to do was ‘un-hide’ Escondido by building an arts center,” says Steve Wolff, president of A.M.S. Planning and Research, a national arts management consulting firm, called to Escondido over the past 10 years to advise on the city’s downtown redevelopment.

Oleg Lobanov, an arts administrator for 35 years, has spent the last three years in Escondido as president of the California Center.

“It (the center) will enhance the quality of life in this region. Overnight we will change the options of what 1,200,000 people can do culturally,” he claims. “While we will have thousands of square feet devoted to what our business is, we have to start with quality of life because quality of life is directly linked to the arts.

Besides offering performing arts events, the Center also plans to be a full-service, multipurpose campus. “There is no place in this country where four buildings will come on line at the same time for the performing arts and the visual arts, and be philosophically tied to a community the way we will be,” Lobanov says, pointing to partnership programs being developed with nearby colleges (Cal State San Marcos, Palomar College) along with public and private schools in the region, master classes and artist-in-residence programs.

Center people also envision “curatorial programming,” hoping to offer cross-disciplinary programs--a series, for example, on Mexico, with Mexican sculpture and paintings in the galleries, a folklorica group in the concert hall, a Latino drama company in the theater, a “fiesta” in the conference hall.

From its start in the mid-’80s, the center has been planned as a public-private partnership. The city provided the land and helped finance the buildings through bond issues and development fees, saving the center from having to go through the traditional wooing of patrons for its construction and start-up costs.

A nonprofit private corporation operates the complex with a $6-million annual budget, backed by a $500,000 interest-bearing fund from the city. Income from box office and rentals is optimistically hoped to be about $4 million--any deficit would have to be offset through interest on the reserve fund and through private donations and fund-raising efforts. Two years ago the center’s development officials and volunteers raised $360,000, last year $600,000 and this year the goal is $800,000.

Equally important, the center has what no other similar facility has, an attached conference center where $900,000 in bookings--50% of its first-year goal--have already been made, Center officials say.

T he art museum began as Feli cita Foundation, a group of Escondido residents who put on community art exhibits in a 2,000-square-foot former city library. Now the California Center for the Arts Museum will occupy 9,000 square feet of galleries linked to the performing arts halls along with an additional four artist studios, photography lab and video facility.

Exhibitions are scheduled into 1996, says Director Reesey Shaw, with “Wildlife” the inaugural exhibition, a show emphasizing the image of animals. Included are William Wegman’s Polaroids and paintings by Donald Roller Wilson.

The museum buildings open to a sculpture court for temporary exhibits. A permanent on-site sculpture will be an installation by San Diego artist Mathieu Gregiore, a series of blue granite boulders, starting with rough textured rock near the adjacent parking facility and moving toward smoother, almost-finished boulders near the performing halls.

Some doubters have scoffed at the center’s demographic studies, questioning if there really is much citizen interest and support in the project. The use of tax moneys for art projects came under debate at several Council meetings. And one local resident claimed the city was losing its identity with the name change to the California, not Escondido, center for the arts.

Construction snags caused opening dates to be moved several times from late 1993 to early 1994 and finally October of this year. Putting a spin on the delays, one center officer said it was better to delay until October since most performance seasons open in the fall.

Last month center officials asked for and got a 10-year, $1.5-million loan from the City Council when its budget came up short in buying such items as time clocks and kitchen equipment.

Just as the inaugural season was to be announced last spring, the center’s first executive vice president, Neil Archer Roan, left--causing a scramble to find a new “artistic director.” Before leaving for a post with the Oregon Bach Festival, Roan said he had carved out a “killer season”--but one with almost no theater offerings. “There’s so much competition in San Diego with the Old Globe, the San Diego Repertory and the La Jolla Playhouse,” Roan had reasoned. “We should explore, try to complement what they do, maybe bring in some children’s theater.”

But his replacement, Robert A. Freedman, who had been director of Portland’s Center for the Performing Arts, has a different slant. “I’m leaning to use it (the 400-seat theater) more as a theatrical space,” he says. “It’s the right size for a smaller regional theater company or a linkup by us with the La Jolla Playhouse for a second season or with other theatrical companies. The San Diego Symphony committed itself to traveling north for four concerts in the new hall and Freedman hopes others will do the same.

“It’s all like a ‘field of dreams,’ ” says Sarah Davies, West Coast booking agent for ICM Artists, Ltd., of the growth of new performing arts centers. Davies says that in many communities, “local business people feel they have to congratulate themselves by having culture in their towns. So they build buildings with the belief that they (audiences, businesses, investors) will come.” More than buildings are needed, she says.

A truer gauge of a community’s commitment would be how much money is budgeted for programming--from its first year on, whether the facility will make its own programming commitments or just rent out space. “There are halls all over the West without buyers (resident programmers) any more or without any money to bring acts in. Independent promoters have to be found to do the booking,” Davies says.

With all of its planning and building, its committees and support, could this new California Center for the Arts, Escondido, disappoint?

“If we offered unimaginative programming we might be driven into the red,” answers Center President Lobanov, “or if we didn’t think of our linkage with the community, or of the quality of what we present, or if we try to do too many things too soon. Then we might fall and hurt ourselves financially. Now is the time to move slowly, especially because of the size of this place. We’ve set our philosophy, our main diet.

“Now we must ask ourselves what will be here one year or two years and more from now.”*