Published in Creative Loafing Sarasota, October 6, 2010
The Ringling International Arts Festival was originally slated to be an every-other-year event. But after the success of last year’s kick-off, the movers and shakers of Sarasota’s governmental, arts and tourism organizations felt they had to find a way to capitalize on the event again this year and started figuring out how to pay for it. Sarasota County had already committed $250,000 to RIAF, but after the city of Sarasota came up with $100,000 and Manatee County threw in another $250,000, organizers started thinking bigger. The final result is Festival sARTée, an arts extravaganza running Oct. 8-24 and stretching to every corner of Sarasota and Manatee counties, with events represented by nearly every arts organization on the Suncoast.
The original concept behind Festival sARTée came from Charleston’s Spoleto Festival, which has grown into one of the biggest arts festivals in the world. “Spelato Fest started as a fringe festival,†says Sarasota County Arts Council Executive Director Jim Shirley. “Our arts organizations aren’t crazy about the word ‘fringe,’ so [the Sarasota Convention & Visitors Bureau and the Arts Councils of both counties] got together to talk about doing anything we can to come up with a Spoleto-type festival. We went out to all the arts organizations and encouraged them to do events during that time to create a lot of cultural activity, and start building what’s going to be a bigger festival down the road. We’re up to 60 events now. Some were on the schedule anyway and got souped up to be part of the festival, but many of them are built from scratch.†(more…)