The Cultural Component

Glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly glow in front of Abravanel Hall across from the Mormon Temple. Outside, his version of the sun and moon are suspended in midair; inside, a 10-by-27-foot tower, constructed of steel and 1,118 pieces of twisted red glass, flashes like frozen fire through the huge windows that front the arts center. Nearby, members of the American Poetry and Literacy Project dispense volumes of poetry to spectators, and behind the Gateway shopping complex downtown the drumming of Native Americans sounds from a tent-museum of Navajo culture.

One and a half million visitors are expected to flock to Salt Lake for the XIX Winter Olympics to see the world’s elite athletes compete in events that include skating, snowboarding and skiing. But organizers of the 2002 Olympic Arts Festival hope that while they are here, many of them will dip into museum exhibitions, dance performances, concerts and theater assembled--and in some cases commissioned--to complement the Games.

In all, the arts festival in Salt Lake City, which runs from Feb. 1 through March 16 (with some exhibitions continuing into September) includes more than 60 performances, 10 major exhibitions and 50 community programs put together with a budget of $35 million. Of that, $6 million comes from the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, raised through private donations. The balance came from the artists and arts organizations, which put up some or all of the money required to bring their exhibitions and performances to Salt Lake. The Lear Family Foundation, for example, paid to bring one of only 25 surviving original copies of the Declaration of Independence for display in the rotunda of the state capitol.

The link between the Games and the arts goes back to the Olympics’ origins in ancient Greece, scholars say. The Pythian Games held in Delphi in 580 B.C. included a music competition between citizen soldiers, according to Raymond T. Grant, director of this year’s arts festival, and flutists played in the Olympic stadium to give javelin throwers their rhythm. A terra-cotta vase buried in an Athenian grave decorated with a poem describes a 740 B.C. dancing contest that historians are “pretty sure” was related to the Olympic tradition, says Grant: “He who dances most nimbly of all take this [vase] as your prize.”

The modern Olympic charter mandates some sort of cultural festival, but Grant says historians argue about when precisely the cultural component was included. From 1906 to 1948, Olympic athletes actually competed for medals in artistic competitions, such as sculpture and literature. In more recent Olympiads, the cultural component has taken the form of performances and exhibitions.

“The only specificity that the International Olympic Committee charter gives us is to present programs that are of interest to those competing in the Olympic Games,” Grant said. Grant took on the job of organizing the 2002 festival in July 1998, moving to Salt Lake City from Florida, where he headed the performing arts and film programming team of the Disney Institute in Orlando. He had previously served as general manager of the American Symphony Orchestra in New York City and directed the Tisch Center for the Arts in New York.

Grant said no single previous Olympic Arts Festival served as a model for Salt Lake’s, but he instead chose successful aspects from a number of them. From Atlanta, who hosted the Summer Games in 1996, he took the idea of creating one major art exhibition as a focal point; in Salt Lake that takes the form of Chihuly’s four commissioned glass sculptures and the accompanying exhibit downtown. From Sydney he learned that cultural activities should be centrally located, and free transportation should be linked to tickets.

Overall, his goal was to create a festival that would showcase the art of the host country and geographic region. “These programs define the atmosphere of the Games,” Grant said. “Artists define a sense of place. I believe that the cultural programming will be the flavor that visitors will leave with.”

In particular, Grant said, he hopes the festival will debunk some of the myths of the American West. “A survey of European tourists showed that less than 4% even know Utah is a state,” Grant said. “European visitors expect to land at the airport and be greeted by cowboys and Indians.”

Robert Fitzpatrick, now the head of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, directed the ambitious and successful Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival in 1984. He used it as a platform to piggyback culture onto the appeal of sports.

“What I wanted to do was use the Olympics, which are popular, accessible, and don’t sound so highbrow, to seduce people into performances and museums,” says Fitzpatrick. “People thought, ‘It can’t be that off-putting, or avant-garde if it has the Olympics label.’”

Grant, too, said he is proud of introducing the Salt Lake community to artists they may not have seen before. Indeed, organizers strove to keep ticket prices affordable so that locals could attend. That local interest has been reflected to date in ticket sales. As of Feb. 14, Grant said the Olympic Arts Festival was on track to sell 92% of the total tickets available. He said about three-quarters of those were bought by residents who live within a 45-minute drive of Salt Lake City.

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‘Create a Bit of a Laboratory’

“What we have tried to do is create a bit of a laboratory, not to have artists who would blow in, do a gig, and leave town,” Grant said, defining the difference between his cultural programming and the nightly pop music concerts at Olympic Medals Plaza, or the pomp and flash of the opening ceremony, neither of which is part of the cultural festival. “Connected to that is the commissioning of new work. I doubt the Bare Naked Ladies introduced any new material.”

Besides the Chihuly commission, Grant cites a number of dance works as evidence of the new work on display: Judith Jamison’s one-act jazz suite for the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre, based on the life of 1980s track champion Florence Griffith Joyner, and a new work by contemporary Pilobolus Dance Theatre.

“The heart of this is that the artists will own the work,” he said. “If the works were done for the opening ceremonies, they would end up locked in the Olympic Museum [in Lausanne, Switzerland]. This is the only way to help artists’ works become part of the repertoire.”

Other festival highlights include the “Utah’s First Nation” exhibition at the Utah Museum of Natural History, a multimedia look at eight tribal cultures from the Navajo to Ute. At the University of Utah Marriott Library, near the stadium where the opening ceremonies were held, an exhibit assembled by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., details the controversial history of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, including Nazi origins of the Olympic torch tradition in modern times.

The festival also showcases other aspects of U.S. and Utah local color, with programs by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, cowboy poets and a full-scale professional rodeo. A warehouse of the work of Utah artists is open in Springville about a 30-minute drive from downtown Salt Lake.

Only about a quarter of the tickets to art performances have gone to Olympic visitors so far, and Grant says athletes tend to be “more interested in television and video games than Ailey,” but he hopes the festival will do its job for visitors and locals.

“So much of the activity they came to see ends at 4:30,” Grant said of the Olympic spectators.

“When night falls, with the exception of those watching ice skating, they will be looking for things to do.”

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Additional Information: www.saltlake2002.com