- [Announcer] Someone gave, someone donated, someone left a legacy.
Generations of generous someones have helped shape Rhode Island into this amazing place we call home.
How do you thank them?
By leaving your own legacy.
We can help.
(upbeat music) - Welcome to another edition of In Another Opinion, a public information program, where our discussions are focused on the diversity of the state of Rhode Island.
I'm your host to Peter Wells.
My guest today is Barnaby Evans from WaterFire and WaterFire Arts Center.
Barnaby, thanks for being on the show.
- Peter I'm delighted to be here, good to see you again.
- I know we've been trying to get make this happened for a bit.
- We've talked about it every time I see you and over coffee on Broadway, so delighted to be here.
- Well, I'm glad we finally got it together.
- [Evans] Yeah.
- Listen, tell people and 'cause I don't know the answer to this question.
What was the motivation originally for WaterFire for you?
- [Evans] Well, first of all, that it was 28 years ago.
- [Peter] Has it been that long though?
My gracious.
- It's been that long.
I came to Providence from California to go to school at Brown and then loved Rhode Island and the community here and the scale of the community and how you could interact with people.
And I watched this astonishing project where the city of Providence really elected to reinvent itself by uncovering the rivers and watch the construction.
And it was fascinated because it was a really broad stroke solution to a variety of problems.
And then it opened, the first section of it opened in middle of '93 and it immediately became clear 'cause the mall wasn't built yet.
None of those buildings were well, the Citizens Tower had gone.
- [Peter] Sure that was there.
- That was in construction at the same time.
But there was no reason to go to this wonderful new park because there was nothing there yet.
And you had a classic challenge of chicken or the egg, how do you prime the pump to make it a success?
And I realized that we made a bold investment on the future, but to transition you needed to do something to create a reason to go look at a river because you could look at a river almost anywhere in the United States.
So, how do you transform that into a revelatory experience that someone would travel for?
And then I began to think of how it was an opportunity for rebirth and renewal and recreation and all these cultural references to being rebirth out of fire, and I began to think, we could make a celebratory event literally about seeing Providence in a new light and turn off the street lights and light it by the warmth of firelight and candlelight and things like that and celebrate the extraordinary rich diversity, cultural diversity of all our different communities who have festivals all in the neighborhoods.
We didn't have a way where downtown, downtown was pretty empty at that point.
- Yes it was.
- The restaurants were closing for summers.
Some restaurants were closed for all of July.
And so I began to realize, we could try to make something that would transform Providence, both in the minds of those of us who lived here because people were always sort of thinking, oh, Providence, it's so dangerous and nothing is happening.
And try to make it a destination city by using art, which is sometimes in a reason to allow people to see things in a fresh way anyway, and then build in that a recognition of the sacredness that light plays in almost every culture, from religious culture, from ceremonial culture, from poetry and literature, we think of light as a source of inspiration and leadership.
And that was really the initial idea there, could you take a dark river in the middle of a city that people were frightened about going downtown to stay at and get Americans to leave their cars behind and join together and walk through the dark together and rediscover their city.
That was the idea.
And I never imagined 28 years later, I would still be doing this.
This was considered in my mind to be a one time celebration on new year's Eve, 1994 with first night.
- Yes.
- Which is now first works, but a first night to sort of stake out this new space and say, Hey, we have this to celebrate.
Let's come together over it.
And so 28 years later, we're just about to announce our 2022 season.
- Wow.
- So it's been a remarkable gift to me from not only the community, but individual volunteers who've made it possible, partners, cultural partners in every community.
It's been such an honor to be led into these communities from the Black community, the Jewish community, we've recognized the Holocaust Memorial that's down there, the military community, we recognize the Vietnam vets and we had such a chance to build bridges and build conversations about how as a community we can respect each other and engage each other and celebrate all of these things we have in common.
- Well, it's true.
I had the pleasure of participating in at least two of them, but the one I remember the most was with leadership Rhode Island.
- [Evans] Sure, yeah.
- And I carried a flame.
I remember that was a very, very interesting experience.
- Exactly, well that torch procession goes all the way back to an ancient Greek thing called the Prometheus which is about the myth of Prometheus stealing, the fire and light from Mount Olympus.
And it was meant as a celebration of leadership and engagement and new ideas.
And in the meantime, we had some detours there where, the Nazis sort of perverted that, and we need to stay back to the original purpose that this was a symbol of freedom and insight and leadership and forethought, Prometheus means forethought.
And Providence, the name Providence is also about thinking for the future, providing for the future.
So it all ties together in an interesting way.
- That's true.
And it's taken off in a lot of other places as well, I mean.
- We've had the pleasure and the privilege of bringing it to some other cities, most memorably bringing it to the city of Rome, on the Tiber river.
And coming back from the city of Rome, I was pleased to tell the mayor that, compared to Rome, the city of Providence runs like a Swiss watch.
(laughs) - That was an interesting statement.
(laughs) - [Evans] There I think a couple references there, but- - Exactly.
- Yeah, it was, we've typically had a chance to bring volunteers from Providence with us, where they come over and create these events.
And what's fascinated me is it's worked, we've done it in Singapore, we did it in Rome, did a small version, Venice, we did a version in Houston.
These are very different places.
- Absolutely.
- Extraordinarily different places.
And yet in each of those places, the magic happens, in Italy, it's pretty hard to get the Roman community that sort of calm down and be quiet.
But we did a dance piece in the middle of downtown Tiber, in the middle of WaterFire to this just amazing piece of music.
And people were just absolutely silent.
They were just mesmerized by this piece.
You don't see that in Rome.
- No, no.
- It's a pretty rowdy city.
And after that, I had a Roman gentleman came up to me and he said, "This is just magnificent."
He said, "This is Rome."
(laughs) I was like, okay, you're right.
But what he's talking about is as human beings, we've always had this fascination with light, with fire.
We created our civilization at the hearth of mastering this element and being able to use it as both a tool and a source of light.
And it became poetically, a source of inspiration and of organization.
And it's got a lot of depth to do it, a lot of power to it as a metaphor.
And that's why I chose when I was trying to figure out what do you do with a city where people are afraid to come downtown?
What do you do to talk about the new future for Providence?
And that was the idea was we should use light for this.
And that's what we made at the heart of the art insolation.
- It's interesting, I came to Providence in 1995.
- [Evans] Okay, all right.
- At the very beginning.
- [Evans] Exactly.
- Of the process.
And I always wondered why people were concerned about coming into Providence.
I'm a Manhattan knight.
(chuckles) - [Evans] Well, you have a different perspective.
- Exactly, exactly.
And I've lived in Houston.
And some of these other places that I've been, and which were far more volatile than Providence was kind of interesting to me.
And when WaterFire began and people were coming down and just lining up along the river and taking photographs and the food and the music initially reminded me very much of 17th, 18th century, Europe, quite frankly.
- And the music was deliberately very eclectic from every culture around the world.
I was trying to play music that I thought people hadn't heard, because we listened to music that we know in a different way than we listened to music that we haven't heard.
So I wanted to express the diversity and richness of the many cultures, but also I didn't wanna necessarily play something that people felt they knew, 'cause then people almost don't listen there.
- [Peter] Exactly.
- Yeah I know that song, they sort of tune it out and they keep talking, and I wanted it at a volume where people could still have conversations with each other, 'cause it was about community and one of the things that I was quite astonished about and from Manhattan and Houston, your experience, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Very often in a public place, we don't know how to start a conversation because we're not quite sure, what perspective the person is, who we're talking to.
Do I have the right to say hello?
It's not necessarily a fear thing.
It's also a thing of courtesy.
Do I interrupt the reverie this person is having?
And what sociologists have long observed is what works very well as something called triangulation.
And we've all seen that, when there's a big bump on the airline, suddenly everybody talks to each other.
Because there's either was startled out of their reverie and now there was something that they know could talk about.
And we talk about the weather for example, but the ideal triangulation sociologically to build engagement is something related to the arts.
And so at WaterFire people start conversations with total strangers.
- Yes.
- Where they talk about the ceremony or the music or the fire or the beauty or their feelings.
And then they get into really deep conversations.
I have met so many people who got married, whose first date was a night at WaterFire, and they come up and they wanna tell me these stories, which is wonderful, I love hearing these stories, but there's an opportunity there both to share the richness of the community and to create a safe space where people are comfortable initiating conversation with someone they don't know, someone who doesn't look like them.
Someone whose perspective suddenly might be relevant to a performance piece or a music piece or something like that.
And our cities need something like that.
Manhattan needs something like that.
And in Rome we had the same effect there.
So it's been intriguing to me that in cultures as different, Singapore which is a very sort of straight laced Asian community, to Houston which is, because of the climate they're often, people are often quite isolated and all of them have great cultural wealth to engage with.
- Tremendous diversity in both.
- Exactly, and both of them Singapore is astonishing and diverse.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And wonderful opportunities there.
And then the other thing is I've got a incredibly hardworking staff that's behind the scene that tries to build the experience for the volunteers as another bridging activity, from volunteer to volunteer.
And one of the things that Alexa Tocfield wrote about when he visited the United States, or was new in the United States at the time, was that how much volunteerism and private civic engagement of people together could transform the place.
Youth interviewed many, many people from non-profit organizations.
And that is a sort of a uniquely American concept where citizens get together for the public good.
And that's the same reason why our volunteers come and volunteer.
And they enjoy doing the work, it's not easy work, it's hard work in the middle of the night on the river, but that works for them.
- And it's given birth to the center.
- [Evans] The WaterFire Art Center, yes absolutely.
- [Peter] What's going on there today?
- Well, the WaterFire Art Center was a industrial building in the sort of gateway to only Villa the valley neighborhood along the Monash Tucker river, same river on which we do WaterFire.
And it sat empty for about 50 years because of a brown field contamination, the extent of which was a little bit unknown.
And so any developer is always nervous 'cause you just don't, you can do some tests, but you just don't know what you're gonna encounter.
And we worked with a series of great professionals on that project and they had made an estimate of what they thought the cleanup would be of a little over $2 million.
And it was just about that.
It was about 2.4 million to clean that up.
But the importance of that is here we had a contaminated site, which was slowly leeching into the rivers, into the soil and dust carrying it into the air.
And now we totally cleaned that up.
And then we renovated the building and the building was to be the gathering site for our equipment and trucks and stuff like that.
But the building, once we cleaned it up and took a look at it, it was a gorgeous example of early 20th century mill architecture, full of glass and stuff like that.
So we realized that this would have more value to the community, not as our store room for our trucks and equipment, but as a center for people to gather, for engagements and for art exhibitions.
And so right now we have, since the COVID pandemic started, we realized we shouldn't be gathering people in large single night events.
So we've been doing a whole series of exhibitions in there that usually are up for a month or, the current one's up for six weeks, that take again sort of the WaterFire idea and doing taking a large view of various issues.
The first one we did was about the anniversary of the landing on the moon that was before COVID.
- [Peter] I remember that yeah.
- And where we had a huge 23 foot moon in there, and we talked about the philosophical revelations that occurred when suddenly we were off planet.
And you could now start to think about living on another planet or going to the moon.
That was, you and I remember that, that was like, wow, I remember looking up at that moon and saying someone is walking up there right now.
- [Peter] Exactly.
- And it was like, it's wow.
- Yeah, it's true.
- And then we did a show and then when COVID started, the first show we did was of Howard Ben Tre, wonderful glass artist who we lost a few years ago and a retrospective of his work, wonderful exhibition.
And then we did a show of Robert Rome, another absolutely gifted sculptor, who was the head of the URI sculpture department for a while.
Then we did Mary Beth Meehan, who did those wonderful large portraits of people all over downtown.
And with Mary Beth Meehan we wanted to step back and look at the work she did first in Brockton and then in Providence and then in Georgia, in a town really rift by racial animosity and exchange.
And she did portraits of everyone in the community and treated them equally to this large scale.
And then she went to do work in Silicon valley.
And the show we have up right now is a piece called the earth, the planet earth, the environment and our future.
And it's using art as an opportunity to look at climate change, carbon footprints, how, and the difficulty we with which we've had to reach consensus about how to equitably move forward to solve these problems.
And the show is looking at work from 1826 to 2022.
- [Peter] Wow.
- And it's looking over that broader range because the first scientific article warning about climate change was published in 1826.
It's been almost 200 years we've been concerned about this problem.
We know the science, we know we need to do something.
We know what we need to do, but figuring out how to make such a vast change is the challenge and this show is looking at that.
- Well, it's interesting that you've taken art as the medium to address the issue.
Most people probably don't make, initially make a connection between art and environment.
- [Evans] Right.
- But yet they do.
If you look at a portrait or a picture or- - Or landscape.
- Landscape.
- You think of Adams, and you think of the sort of national parks, those really were born out of these, out of the invention of photography and not to mention the Hudson river school were painting these vast allegorical paintings of the American west and manifest destiny, which I have political implications, all these ideas.
And you know colonization, settler colonization.
There are big issues here that art can either address or can advance.
And often by using art as a conduit to expand the conversation, you have a new perspective and different people come to the conversation and hopefully we've got some good lectures coming up, but that's the WaterFire Art Center is both a functioning place where they're short exhibitions, long exhibitions.
And it allows us to continue our mission of how can the arts reinvent and strengthen the entire breadth of our community here in Rhode Island.
- Has WaterFire generated enough interest to bring in more dollars and royalties let's say, I don't know if you do receive royalties.
- Well, the challenge for WaterFire is it's is everything we do is free.
So, and the reason for that is very often the communities that are least served and least able to be able to pay an admission price, whether it be to a museum or a theater, or a concert hall or something like that, we need to be very careful to make a place where everyone feels welcome.
And the arts has made strides in that direction.
But even still in the arts, there tends to be a sense of exclusion.
It's not meant to drive people away.
It comes from a tradition of excellence, which means we're selecting this versus that because we feel it's truly accomplished, but that can be, so we're deliberately putting art in the middle of the public streets and sidewalks and parks where everyone feels they have a stake there.
And so as a consequence, we have a philosophical position that we shouldn't charge admission to a public park and a public street and a public space.
That's just, it's a opposed to our mission.
It's also really inappropriate.
- I agree.
- These are public spaces.
- Yeah.
- And so, although creating WaterFire is quite expensive from hiring police and insurance and all the staff that make it happen and paying the artists to perform and stuff like that.
It forces us to become more creative.
And so individual donations and contributions are a really important part of it.
We pay royalties on the music we play, we don't collect royalties on the use of the WaterFire name from people, but we have many people to thank from the city of Providence, the state of Rhode Island.
State of Rhode Island recognizes the economic benefit for filling hotels and restaurants and making those businesses and those jobs available.
We did, the federal government did a study when they looked at dredging and calculated the millions of dollars of the economic impact that WaterFire has.
So that raises sales tax and all that sort of things.
So we do get some support from the state legislature considerably below the sales tax that we earn for the state.
And then we've got some great corporate sponsors.
Who've been longtime sponsors, leadership Rhode Island, for example.
Although that's an inkind sort of thing, but yeah, that's the recipe.
- [Peter] That's how it's developed.
- It means we gotta keep working though.
And it also means that many of the new ideas we'd like to do are challenging to find the sponsors for, you'll probably remember the WaterFire ballroom, which we occasionally hold at the foot of the Turks Head Building.
And that's an event where we would feature.
So we had these great Cape Verdean dances, funana, and I'd love to bring that back.
It's a lot of expense to light all those buildings and set up the stage.
So that's one of my dreams is to bring that back.
So if you know, a sponsor, let us know.
- We'll definitely keep it in mind Barnaby.
Listen, do you know the WaterFire has put Providence on a map quite frankly, for a lot of other reasons and all positive reasons.
And so obviously the community is looking for the next big thing that come from Barnaby Evans.
- No I see, great.
Just what I need.
(laughs) Well, as I just mentioned, we have lots of in embroidery additions, we'd love to build people from build additional stages and activities further into downtowns to get that pedestrian walking, infiltration from the park river itself, into some of the streets of downtown.
And that's something we're looking forward to doing.
I got some other ideas too, but- - I know you do, you'll see.
- Yeah, you and I often talk about the thinking big thinking in new ways.
And the other thing that had always struck me about Providence, which is why I stayed here when I came here in '71, was how rich the community is, and that it's a community at a scale where you recognize each other, you and I have talked to each other for 25 years.
- Yeah.
- And we have a lot of respect for each other.
We know what each other is doing.
We know how to reach each other, you see each other in the street.
And that's, Athens was like that.
It was a very small community where people had sort of a respectful interaction with each other.
When cities get quite a bit bigger, then they cleave into more isolated individuals.
And one of the things, communities, and one of the things I saw in '94 when I first did this was many of our communities, they were localized and they weren't interacting on a main stage downtown.
And it was that sort of sense of, we need to celebrate the richness we've got and bring it to a place where everyone could come together to celebrate that.
- And you've done it, you've done it.
- Well, we've done it.
It's not me, it's we've had the community was equal partner here in this idea and with generosity and with good spirit, we've got a great staff, our volunteers supported us.
And then the sponsors, it's been a virtuous circle where everyone realized, wow, we can accomplish this.
We can transform our city.
And the other thing we did, which was an experiment, a successful one, but we do things like the glass chandeliers that are out there in public and the parks department said, that's not a good idea that you can't do that.
And I said, "Well, let's experiment."
I have faith that when we reach out to the community, invite everyone to this celebration, that everyone is gonna be on their best behavior and darned they have been.
You see everyone saying, oh, excuse me, I'm sorry, it's absolutely wonderful.
- [Peter] It is.
- And that's a great testimony to the community as well.
- And Barnaby it's what I heard in beginning as to what the motivation was, you've accomplished it as an organization and the city is been better off for, I'll tell you.
And every time I think about WaterFire, I think about the winter solstice in the 1300 or something.
And I kind of enjoying that basis, but listen, We're running out of time and 'cause you know, a half hour.
- It's always too short with you, Peter.
It's always too short.
- Never enough time.
(laughs) - Exactly.
- But in closing 10 seconds, anything we should be looking for immediately.
- Well, the first thing is thank you to everybody, that's my message.
And second, we've got a lot of ideas.
We'd welcome everyone to come forward with their ideas.
It's the places that sort of interaction and keep looking at, take a look at WaterFire we've announce the season on April 27th.
- Very good, we'll be there.
Be my last time before I leave, quite frankly.
- Actually, Peter, this will be fun, we're gonna miss you.
- [Peter] And I'll miss you Barnaby.
- Enjoy your North Carolina.
- Thank you.
- [Evans] Okay.
- We have run out of time, but I wanna thank today's guest Barnaby Evans and you the viewers for tuning into another edition of In Another Opinion, a special thanks to PBS for making this program possible.
I'm your host, Peter Wells.
Give us your opinion on Facebook and at In Another Opinion and have a great day.
(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Someone gave, someone donated, someone left a legacy.
Generations of generous someones have helped shape Rhode Island into this amazing place we call home.
How do you thank them?
By leaving your own legacy.
We can help.