Fantastic Wantastiquet – A Multi-Disciplinary Fall Foliage Arts Festival

I am proposing a multi-disciplinary arts and cultural festival to take place annually in and around Brattleboro during the ‘fall foliage’ season. In practical terms this will mean from the beginning of September through the week following Columbus Day.

Here are some thoughts about the Festival which I have recently put into writing. Please note that one of the functions of the festival is to focus extraordinary funding for the arts into that season or window of time.                                            [Photograph by William Hays]

I am seeking individuals who may be interested in serving on the founding Board of Fantastic Wantastiquet. This will be a non-profit organization, will seek funding through grants and charitable donations, and will distribute grants whose arts & cultural work projects contribute to the local economy and to the themes and purposes of the Festival.

If you are interested in working on this project; being part of the team that actually makes it happen, kindly get in touch with me via email at wilmerding [at] myfairpoint [dot] net

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Festival description:

Fantastic Wantastiquet – A Multi-Disciplinary Arts and Cultural Festival                                           

The late, great Blanche Moyse, founder of the Brattleboro Music Center and the New England Bach Festival, frequently said “The smartest business decision of my career was scheduling the New England Bach Festival during the fall foliage season.” Proposed is a multi-disciplinary arts and cultural festival for the greater Brattleboro, Vermont area, to take place in the Fall Foliage season, and to be called ‘Fantastic Wantastiquet’.

This proposed festival seeks to build upon Mme. Moyse’s wisdom and extraordinary past success with the New England Bach Festival by uniting arts and cultural events and activities in Brattleboro, Vermont and its immediate vicinity (Windham and Cheshire Counties) into a common schedule, with common and shared marketing, publicity, and scheduling/calendar efforts, jointly-produced productions, works, and special events, and with a permanent annual grant program that will fund artists, artisans, and arts / cultural organizations who will schedule and/or produce special works, events, etc., to be presented during the fall foliage season under the overall festival theme.

The resulting ‘unified’ or collaborative fall festival will be called ‘Fantastic Wantastiquet’, a name which speaks to common natural features of both Cheshire and Windham Counties.

[‘Placemaking’ purpose and effect: While the prominent Mount Wantastiquet, across the Connecticut River in NH and overlooking Brattleboro, is conventionally the best-known local feature or landmark by that name, ‘Wantastiquet’, the Abenaki word for ‘river that leads to the west’, is the original name of both the West River and the immediate Brattleboro area, and thus potentially extends the place-identification and ‘branding’ of this event throughout most of Windham County as well. In addition, efforts to plan for the overall economic planning and development of the Town of Brattleboro have been stymied by the fact that in reality, Brattleboro (population 14,000) is the downtown and nexus for a much wider area, estimated at around 30,000. Thus it makes sense to establish the project as serving the larger, wider, ‘greater’ Brattleboro area.]

Inception & Schedule: This festival is planned to commence for the first time in the fall foliage season of 2015. Grant funds, volunteers, and other resources will be secured and recruited for the purpose of hiring a Coordinator and disbursing grants to artists and artistic / cultural organizations to fund and commission the production of works and events during the festival period, which will extend from Labor Day weekend through the weekend after the Columbus Day holiday.

It is also hoped that because of additional ‘lead’ (planning) time and possible expanded opportunities to secure funding, etc., that the second annual Fantastic Wantastiquet festival, to take place in 2016, will grow and expand upon the scope of the first one.

Advantage: It is well-known that during the fall foliage season, Brattleboro and Vermont usually see a quantum increase in the influx of out-of-state tourists from all quarters, eager to see the leaves of the Green Mountains bursting into a rainbow of colors. The Fantastic Wantastiquet festival will add to this allure, and as with the former New England Bach Festival, will also provide an additional attraction for musicians and other performing and exhibiting artists to travel here to present their work, and to collaborate with others on special performances, exhibits, and other events. An additional advantage is that the leaves on Mount Wantastiquet usually turn color or ‘peak’ about a week later than those in the surrounding area, extending the festival’s calendar schedule and leading to a sort of ‘climax’ based upon the phenomenon of ‘peak foliage’; the resplendent, variegated coloring of the trees’ leaves during the season.

Funding: As a comprehensive arts and cultural project based in Brattleboro, the Fantastic Wantastiquet Festival will seek to appropriate (receive as a grant) part of the remaining funds for the CoreArts project, a joint project under the auspices of the Town of Brattleboro and the Arts Council of Windham County. In addition, the Festival will seek funding under the Windham County Economic Development Program, a project of the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Economic Development.

While the purpose of seeking funding under the CoreArts project, in addition to establishing the Festival outright at its outset, will largely be to distribute remaining National Endowment for the Arts grant funds to a wider circle of artists and cultural producers than might otherwise be the case, the purpose of seeking other funding will be to secure the success and longevity of the Festival as an annual event showcasing all the arts and cultural riches of the greater Brattleboro area. Both purposes are expected to have salutary effects on the local economy by distributing financial resources – now available on an unusual or extra-ordinary basis – more broadly through the creative sector. Also, the Festival may engage in specific funding efforts assisting particular projects, much as the Blanche Moyse Chorale recently did to underwrite the production of a major Bach production, the St. John Passion this coming October.

The Case for the Support of Fantastic Wantastiquet – The successes and accomplishments of the CoreArts project will be expanded upon in a timely fashion, preserving their momentum and opening new horizons for growth in the sector. While the early phases of CoreArts concentrated on creating inventories of the arts and culture and related resources in the area, the express purpose of Fantastic Wantastiquet will be to spur and inspire as many local people and organizations as possible to new productions, works, achievements, enterprises, and initiatives.

Appropriateness: As part of the earlier phases of CoreArts, the merging of the organizational and business databases of the Town of Brattleboro and the New England Foundation for the Arts was commissioned. Though little publicized, this exercise indicated that roughly a quarter (25%) of all economic activity in the Town of Brattleboro has something to do with the arts and artisanal activities such as crafts, from arts organizations and craftspeople to commercial businesses that supply artists and arts organizations with the materials they need. Because of this fact, special economic development activities addressed to the arts and cultural sectors are seen as maximizing the potential for broad economic impact; not only the creating of jobs, but also the enabling of existing producers and suppliers of the arts and cultural fields to expand their economic activities and realize new revenues.

Available Resources – There is a wealth of local entrepreneurial and ‘impresario’-type talent available to spark the creation of the Fantastic Wantastiquet festival and propel it into many production and activity areas. It is hoped, for instance, that the ‘movers and shakers’ and creative geniuses now involved with the Town Arts Committee and the Arts Council of Windham County, many of them artists themselves seeking new opportunities and inspirations, will all contribute to the success of Fantastic Wantastiquet.

Moreover, it is expected that publicity attendant to the initial funding for the festival project, to (hopefully) come from the CoreArts project and the State Agency of Commerce and Economic Development and perhaps other sources, will inspire a groundswell of local philanthropic support for the Festival, passing and manifesting through both the central Festival funding and administrative apparatus and directly to the many organizations and creative individuals and entities involved.

Founder and Organizer – John V. Wilmerding, MBA, is a musician, a professionally-trained arts administrator, and a former professional fund raiser who completed the partially NEA-funded MBA in Arts Administration program at (SUNY) Binghamton University’s School of Management in 1981. Mr. Wilmerding has worked with many arts organizations of all kinds and in most fields or genres, from festivals and museums, to individual artists, to the International Music Council of UNESCO. He is committed both to the Brattleboro-area community and to the success of the Fantastic Wantastiquet festival endeavor, and ‘brings to the table’ (so to speak) nearly 25 years’ worth of local involvement in the arts, non-profit sector, and public sector, including current service on the Town of Brattleboro’s Finance Committee and Arts Committee, and past service as a Trustee of the Arts Council of Windham County.