Survey and symposium measure local arts evolution

By David F. Rooney

If you are an active artist, musician or actor or a patron of the arts you may want to click on this link to an arts and culture survey and register your thoughts about the arts scene and where you fit into it.

The survey is a key component of next week’s planned Community Cultural Workshop and Symposium and will help organizers determine how many artists and art patrons are in Revelstoke what media they work in or favour and with what frequency. It’s not a terribly long survey and will only take a few minutes to fill out, but it should give organizers and participants in the workshop a relatively clear sense of Revelstoke’s arts and culture sector.

This is all in aid of a Community Cultural Symposium slated to be held at the Regent Hotel on June 14. The symposium begins with a 3 pm workshop led by consultants Doris Haas and Caroline Miller that is intended to result in a draft vision, goals and strategies for discussion and revision. These will form the basis of an updated and enhanced Cultural Strategy for Revelstoke.

In many ways this is a belated followup to an attempt to forge a coherent arts and culture strategy in 2006. An interim report came from that exercise but changes to the community as well as the local arts scene have overtaken its conclusions.

The symposium will continue at 6:30 pm with a presentation by Bill Usher, executive director of Kicking Horse Culture in Golden who will review the process and strategies on how that rural arts council went from zero local government support to being an $80,000 annual line-item operating commitment. That will be followed by a Q&A session and a discussion of fresh approaches to Revelstoke’s evolving arts and cultural scene.

Both the workshop and the keynote address are free.