Performing Arts, Festivals, and Celebrations

The performing arts, festivals, and community wide celebrations are well documented to build resilience. The program presented by Opus ARCHIVES and Research Out of Mud and Ashes is a powerful foundation for a frontier exploration of this proposition in Santa Barbara.

As previously noted, that the performing arts, festivals, and community wide celebrations build resilience. In his book Performing Cities, Dr. Blair Ruble cites many examples of how the performing arts presented in creative spaces offer natural and playful opportunities for people to take down the walls that separate them and to come together in safe environments of fun and play. And in community tragedies like the floods in Katrina, the public arts provide a link to the deep culture of a community providing an answer of whether to give up or to persevere. In Katrina the public arts restored meaning and purpose for many whose lives were already beyond the edge.

But it doesn’t happen by chance, he cautions. It takes a plan built on a vision of community, diversity, and inclusion.

Santa Barbara is a city of continuing performing arts, festivals, and celebrations. It should be relatively easy to link a community-wide resilience initiative to some of these events.

Notes:

• Performing Community: Diversity, Inclusion, and the Performing Arts
• Santa Barbara Calendar of Events

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