Getting there

• Map, with list of venues

BY THE NUMBERS

Roanoke Arts Festival

• 2 similar festivals: Spoleto USA in Charleston, S.C.; Virginia Arts Festival in Hampton Roads
• 4 days: The event runs Oct. 4-7
• 10 venues: including the Jefferson Center, Mill Mounatin Theatre and the Roanoke Civic Center
• 24 performances: music, theater, dance and art

Aren't sure what to make yet of the Roanoke's new arts festival, which debuts Thursday at multiple venues downtown?

Here's a tip: Think small.

Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither are arts festivals, say organizers of the inaugural event. This year is a trial run -- a long weekend on a short budget ($275,000) that could nonetheless become a blueprint for the years ahead.

"We want the opportunity to kind of test the idea," City Manager Darlene Burcham said.

Conceived by Mayor Nelson Harris, the first Roanoke Arts Festival will feature 20 performances of music, theater and dance over four days. Make that 21, if you include sidewalk artist Michael William Kirby, who will draw a "three-dimensional" arts festival poster in chalk at SunTrust Plaza. Headline acts Judy Collins, Ramsey Lewis and Little Feat join a host of local art groups and the Audubon Quartet.

With performances scheduled at 10 venues, and a downtown living tour and business workshop thrown in for good measure, the Roanoke fine arts festival seems a little ungainly at first glance -- like a colt that may someday win the Triple Crown, but is still finding its legs.

Some issues are unresolved. There is no general festival pass available; festivalgoers must buy individual tickets, sometimes from different ticket offices.

Festival manager Rich Salzberg's plans for a shadow festival of edgy, anything-goes fare, after the famous Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, had to be shelved this year as too ambitious. And the city's most prominent arts organization of recent years, the Art Museum of Western Virginia, which is building a $66 million building downtown, was too busy to participate this year.

"We were so slow out of the gate," said Salzberg recently in his less-than-spacious office in City Hall. The former public relations director at Norfolk's Chrysler Museum of Art, Salzberg wasn't hired to put the festival together until September 2006. "We spent a lot of time defining what a city arts festival is."

And yet, the long-term possibilities are huge. The 17-day Spoleto USA festival in Charleston, S.C., one of America's best-known arts festivals, attracts 39,000 attendees and pumps some $55 million annually into the Charleston economy, according to a 2005 University of South Carolina study.

Closer to home, the Virginia Arts Festival in Hampton Roads has grown into a seven-week event drawing 70,000 people in just over a decade.

"There is an economic impact," to arts festivals, Harris said. "And I think in time we can have that here."

Birth of a festival

The Roanoke Arts Festival was born about two years ago, on a day when Harris and Burcham were discussing upcoming plans for the city.

One of the topics on the table was Roanoke's 125th anniversary. Harris suggested scheduling at least one event that not only would celebrate the anniversary, but also might become an annual event.

An arts festival, perhaps.

"I thought the reasons were pretty obvious," Harris said. Roanoke, though a small city, has a big-city complement of arts and cultural organizations, including a symphony orchestra and regional theater. And then, Roanoke has an eye-catching new art museum rising downtown.

Burcham was assistant city manager in Norfolk the year the Virginia Arts Festival was born. She suggested Roanoke invite that festival's director, Rob Cross, to visit. He spoke to cultural groups and business leaders in November 2005.

"He was very encouraging. People began to get enthusiastic," Harris recalled.

If Cross stoked hopes, he didn't fan the flames. He advised Roanoke to go slow.

"These things obviously take a while," Cross said recently. "We're 11 years old. We've grown pretty dramatically." On the other hand, "We were extremely conservative in our revenue and attendance projections." (Salzberg said they have no target for revenue and attendance in Roanoke this year, but that all proceeds will be channeled back into the festival budget.)

Cross, who has served as a paid adviser to Salzberg this year, said Roanoke has some advantages Norfolk lacked. Cross must stitch together an annual event covering the seven cities from which the festival receives funding, for example. Not so in Roanoke, where most of the performance venues, including the Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre, Mill Mountain Theatre's Waldron and Trinkle stages, Barlow Performance Hall at the Dumas Center and Shaftman Performance Hall at Jefferson Center, are strung like necklace beads within walking distance of one another. Along the same corridor are most of Roanoke's museums, not to mention dozens of restaurants and clubs.

Roanoke brings a variety of homegrown arts and cultural groups to the table. Involving local arts groups is huge, said Cross, because they bring their own resources and audiences to bear.

Cross and Harris envision the two festivals being linked together somehow in the years ahead.

And what does Cross think of Roanoke's efforts so far?

"I think he's got a very cool lineup for the first year," Cross said of Salzberg. "I love that street artist. It's some good stuff."

Playing nice

Several people in the arts community marveled at how quickly Salzberg got so many organizations on the same page.

With a few notable exceptions -- neither the art museum nor the Virginia Museum of Transportation is on board this year -- most of the valley's most prominent cultural organizations are taking part.

Art museum Executive Director Georganne Bingham said recently her staff is too focused on the new building to participate, but is supportive. "I understand completely," Salzberg said.

The Roanoke Symphony Orchestra and Opera Roanoke have teamed up for what may be the festival's signature event Saturday night: a "Great American Concert," featuring music by Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and John Philip Sousa.

The O. Winston Link Museum, Roanoke Ballet Theatre and Southwest Virginia Ballet have all mounted special performances or exhibits for the festival. At the Science Museum of Western Virginia, the homegrown show "In the Glow" will complement Slash Coleman's one-man play, "The Neon Man and Me." Coleman's well-traveled show is a tribute to Roanoke neon signmaker Mark Jamison, who died in 2004.

Salzberg "has done well in working with the local arts community," said Roanoke's public arts coordinator, Susan Jennings, who also said the future of the arts festival could be bright. "All you've got to do is look at what Spoleto has done for Charleston. We've got the infrastructure right here."

"It seems like the natural thing to happen here," said Jeanne Larsen, who heads the graduate program in creative writing at Hollins University. The Hollins writing community will present readings at 202 Market, a restaurant and nightclub downtown, on Friday. "I'm really glad Hollins is involved."

Another Spoleto?

Can Roanoke really match the success of Spoleto?

Who knows? Certainly the size of the city is no deterrent. Charleston, with 96,650 people in the year 2000, is roughly the same size as Roanoke.

And if Roanoke seems poorly poised for hordes of tourists, consider poor Charleston when that festival was getting off the ground.

"The restaurants were lousy," said Spoleto director Nigel Redden. "There were three restaurants."

Ask Redden what makes a festival a success, and he talks about energy and experimentation. "I think there has to be some kind of aspect of the unexpected," Redden said.

He also said you must know who you are. Charleston is a city whose support for the arts reaches back to Colonial days, when it opened America's first theater and staged its first opera. And it is near an ocean, with beaches that draw audiences and performers.

"I don't think that anyone who is doing a festival is going to re-create anybody else's success," Redden said. "Any festival worth its salt is going to create its own success. I trust that a Roanoke festival would reflect Roanoke."

He also wished the Star City all the best. "As far as I'm concerned, it is useful to have more of these events, rather than fewer.

"The more the merrier," Redden said.