Culture & Community | International Festival of Arts & Ideas | Lighthouse Point | Arts & Culture
Anne Tyler Calabresi and Roslyn Milstein Meyer, the ladies of the evening. Judy Sirota Rosenthal Photos.
The first lines of Heinrich Heine’s “Das Meer hat seine Perlen” echoed over the carousel at Lighthouse Point Park, as Lukas Papenfusscline walked along one side of the dance floor, strings of pearls dripping down the front of their shirt. Overhead, lights twinkled, soaking everything in a golden glow. Beneath them, Anne Tyler Calabresi and Roslyn Milstein Meyer looked at each other adoringly, just as they have for decades.
Das Meer hat seine Perlen, Papenfusscline began, drawing out the word Me-er with long, languorous emphasis until a person could nearly see the sea right in front of them. Der Himmel hat seine Sterne. Papenfusscline was picking up momentum, their voice hot at the edges. Aber mein Herz! Mein Herz! Mein Herz hat seine Leibe. They looked across the room, to where Jo Mei and Johnathan Moore waited to join in. They were just getting started.
That scene came to Lighthouse Point Park Sunday night, as the International Festival of Arts & Ideas marked three decades of artmaking in New Haven with its “Pearl” Gala, a fête and fundraiser celebrating co-founders Calabresi and Meyer on the festival’s “pearl anniversary.” Throughout, it became a glowing tribute to its founders, a nod to generations of artists who have come up through the festival, and a reminder that the arts can be a form of resistance.
Interim Executive Director Rev. "RevKev" Ewing. Judy Sirota Rosenthal Photos.
By the end of the night, the organization had raised almost $36,000. In a follow-up call, interim Executive Director Rev. Kevin “RevKev” Ewing declined to comment on the Festival’s current financial status, which includes a loss of federal funding earlier this year. The organization’s most recent tax filings show a total revenue of $4,045,801 (in the fiscal year ending in September 2024, the Festival spent $4,021,539, leaving a net income of $24,262).
“Not many organizations come together and last as long as we have, and continue each year to put on incredible festivals,” said Ewing, the organization’s former board chair who has served as the interim executive director since Shelley Quiala’s departure last year. For him, the meaning of a pearl is particularly significant, because it comes from a mollusk’s built-in response to irritation.
“The International Festival of Arts & Ideas, for 30 years, has been making pearls,” he said. “We have been taking the irritants that come our way, and we turn it into dance. We turn it into music. We turned it into concerts. We turn it into theater. We turn it into precious jewels.”
That work has felt more urgent this year, he added. Since January, Ewing and Festival staff have watched as a national assault on arts and culture unfolds at the White House and across the country, with casualties that range from the Kennedy Center to the American Library Association to small, large and midsize arts organizations that have all come to rely on a chunk of federal funding in their budgets.
Performer Lukas Papenfusscline, who also performs as the musician leiken. Judy Sirota Rosenthal Photos.
For years, Arts & Ideas has been one such organization, with frequent support from the National Endowment for the Arts that has made its programs not just possible, but vibrant and robust. In May, the NEA pulled $65,000 in expected grant funding that was set to cover projects in an already tight budget year, including performances from Minty Fresh Circus, A Broken Umbrella Theatre Company, and Squonk Opera. Less than a month later, the Festival opened its two-week run with scaled-down programming on the New Haven Green and in downtown New Haven.
That followed its signature “Big Read,” a film series and a number of new and well-loved neighborhood festivals across the city.
“The music, the art, the entertainment, the things that we do are designed to bring people together,” Ewing said. “Just like this. I am so happy to have you here.”
The gala, which nearly 300 people attended, comes at an inflection point for the organization that Calabresi and Meyer (along with co-founder Jean Handley, who passed away in 2010) could perhaps not have anticipated 30 years ago. When the Festival launched its programming in 1995, its goal was to bring people together through the arts, in a way Calabresi had seen the Special Olympics do in Connecticut the same year.
Its early years saw some of its most innovative and experimental programming, from large-scale puppetry on the New Haven Green to visits from Rabih Abou-Khalil, Amiri Baraka and Sylvia Rivera to a choreographed history of the city’s Dixwell neighborhood (Judy Sirota Rosenthal, whose photographs grace this article, has captured 24 of those festivals through her lens). By the time it was five years old, it had grown to one of the largest presenting festivals in the country.
Since that time, it has pivoted at least half a dozen times over, including during multiple leadership transitions and in the midst of a global pandemic. There have been, along the way, dozens of theater productions, deep dives into race and migration, storytelling through movement and on the mic, concerts that have shattered box office records, ideas programming that is ahead of the curve on climate change and Indigenous foodways, and long, layered nods to New Haven’s rich history. (Click here for Arts Paper coverage of the Festival from 2017 on).
Johnathan Moore. Judy Sirota Rosenthal Photos.
“We wanted New Haveners of all stripes to come together and discover one another,” Meyer remembered, crediting Calabresi with the foundational vision. “To share wondrous, unforgettable moments together. And to build a strong community where everyone felt welcomed and acknowledged. The amazing thing is that so much of that has come to pass. We couldn’t be more delighted!”
Now, the organization’s eyes appear firmly fixed on the future, while taking a page from its past. When staff and board members think of the next 30 years, they look at the vision that Calabresi, Meyer and Handley laid out in the 1990s, and the glimmer of hope that it provides for the work ahead.
“Their work at the festival and across New Haven inspires us all to dream bigger and do better, and we are so proud to celebrate them here this evening,” said Melissa “Missy” Huber, a longtime member of the festival’s staff who now serves as the organization’s director of artistic planning.
This year, that’s true even in the face of a precipitous slide into authoritarianism that opposes the very diversity that defines New Haven. Or as Ewing said to a few on-edge laughs, “it’s like most of the things we do have suddenly become illegal.”
Sunday, that dedication to the art was most clearly on display in the music and theater itself, which occupied only a small slice of the evening, but seemed to linger long after artists had headed back to their tables for dinner. In the fading light of day, it was palpable in the smooth groove of The Chill Project, a band anchored by artistic father-son duo Dudley and Doron Flake.
Then as Papenfusscline swept dramatically onto the floor before dinner, New Haven’s own Johnathan Moore set the tone, with a performance on cello that felt at once sacred and intimate. It was his musical thread, rich and luminous as a pearl, that knitted speech and song together, as Papenfusscline and Mei charted the pearl through literary and artistic history.
For her part, Calabresi said she was moved by not just the event, but the magic that the festival has become. Thirty years after its founding (which narrowly followed the creation of LEAP in 1992), she still holds tightly to the vision of strengthening New Haven—and bringing its people together—through the arts.
“The Festival was born from a vision of shared community that calls people to bring their best selves, to connect with one another, and to give generously,” she said. “Ours is not the path of a lone shark, but the world of an aquarium full of collaborators. My deepest hope for the future is that we remain steadfast in our pursuit of art in every form.”