Ticket-revenue figures are still being crunched and won’t be available for several days. And it’ll be a couple of weeks before officials at Visit Winston-Salem can say how much money the 2009 National Black Theatre Festival pumped into the local economy.
But Gerry Patton sounded upbeat. She is the executive director of N.C. Black Repertory Company, which presents the festival every other summer in Winston-Salem.
“It appears that we’ve been successful,” she said, though she cautioned that her assessment didn’t have any hard numbers behind it.
The festival ended late Saturday evening with Afro-centric dancing and drumming, as well as a ceremony invoking the spirit of Larry Leon Hamlin, who founded the festival in 1989 and ran it until his death in 2007.
“I’m very, very pleased. Everything’s turned out better than we anticipated in view of all the things going on,” Patton said, referring to the recession.
Attendance might have dipped from the last festival in 2007; several shows took place in venues that appeared one-third to half full. And ticket revenue accounts for a sizable portion of the festival’s $1.1 million budget. Donations, projected to be about $750,000, make up the bulk of revenue.
Patton said she has surveyed festival patrons and welcomes more comments.
She may hear what festival patron Josephine McGriff said Saturday, namely that “$42 for some plays is too much,” particularly for locals who have lost jobs and are struggling to make it in a tough economy.
“This is not Broadway,” McGriff said, responding to festival officials who say their ticket prices amount to a bargain when compared with those charged by big-city theaters.
Still, Patton, N.C. Black Rep’s executive director since 2007, can look back on several excellent productions.
These ranged from those in the new Larry Leon Hamlin Solo Performance Series to several musicals, including Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope and I Am Who I Am: The Teddy Pendergrass Story. John Amos (Good Times and Roots) also returned to present another stellar performance of Halley’s Comet.
And the National Black Theatre Festival may be following the lead of the American Dance Festival in Durham, which now devotes a kind of festival-within-a-festival to the works of choreographers from a foreign country. NBTF presented Fatima Dike’s The Return, introducing a South African company called Artscape in the process.
“It’s so important for us to be seen in a neutral setting,” said Roy Sargeant, who directed Return. “It gives us a lot of gravitas when we come back.”
The team that put together the program includes artistic director Mabel Robinson and Sylvia Sprinkle-Hamlin, Larry Leon Hamlin’s widow, who now serves N.C. Black Rep as a board member.
One challenge for the future remains the festival’s inability to attract a more diverse audience. With the exception of some musicals, such as Cope, very few audience members were white.
Festival officials seem to have become more creative in their strategies for attracting a more diverse audience, by reaching out to whites at receptions and by giving away tickets to veterans, as was the case at Friday’s performance of Halley’s Comet.
Patton sounded optimistic about the festival’s future audiences.
“We have a ways to go,” she said. “But we’re beginning to make progress. Every time I see a different ethnic group, that encourages me. They go tell a friend.”
■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).