Growing the Arts

When the Guilford Performing Arts Festival launched in 2017, it was designed as a three-day weekend showcase of music, dance and theater. “The initial aim was to create a celebration that would bring the community together and leverage the wealth of talent right here on and around the Shoreline,” says Peter Hawes, the organization’s executive director. “It’s evolved to include artists from around the world as well as from around the block, and to incorporate educational and human-service elements. We see it as our mission to entertain, inspire, empower and unite the community.”

Through the volunteer-run festival — which is held every two years — artists perform in dozens of venues across Guilford, centered on the historic Guilford Green but also in churches, the library and community center, businesses, restaurants and a senior center; it drew a record 5,600 people in 2019.

Then COVID hit, forcing a scaled-back version of the festivities in 2021 with fewer shows and volunteers. “We knew 2023 would be a build-back year,” Hawes says. But the lessons from the pandemic also provided an opportunity to reshape the festival and rebrand it. Hawes says the smaller event in 2021 – with six acts down from 73 shows in 2019 – made the festival more digestible for attendees. “When we organized our event in 2023, we expanded it to seven days with events every night leading up the big weekend festival,” Hawes says.

With financial support from the Community Foundation, the organization also marketed the event under a rebranded name — GreenStage Guilford Live Arts — and began to plan events in addition to the biennial festival. “Symbolically, the GreenStage [branding] speaks to the historic green where we put our main stage; to the new (“green”) work that we commission from Connecticut performers; and to our aspiration to put on events that are as environmentally sound as possible,” Hawes says. 

The Community Foundation’s grant funding supported promotion including posters, flyers, direct-mail pieces, social media posts and local newspaper ads to extend the arts to underrepresented groups and more broadly raise awareness of the festival. “In collaboration with Guilford Public Schools, we conducted a dance residency for their unified sports program,” Hawes says, “and also held four open mic nights at a local market to build community and attract a new group of people to our festival.”

The Community Foundation support was part of a larger marketing spend aimed at broadening the festival’s appeal to a wider demographic and bigger geography. “Traditionally, most attendees have come from Guilford, Branford and Madison,” Hawes says. “But one-third of guests in 2023 came from outside those towns, including New Haven and New London.” The 2023 festival also skewed younger and more racially diverse — an outcome that, Hawes says, the arts have a unique ability to create. 

“We want [festival] performers and audiences to represent as broad a swath of humanity as we can,” Hawes says. “The arts reach hearts, minds and bodies, sparking joy, breaking down social barriers, fostering empathy, creating a shared sense of belonging, and providing a gateway for people to pursue their own creative journeys."