Facing challenges, Upper Valley arts groups see hope in togetherness

Lebanon, NH — Last month, Revels North announced its 2025 Midwinter Revels performance would be its last. After 50 years hosting the annual winter classic, the company was forced to close due to significant funding struggles. For others in the Upper Valley arts community, the announcement was a worrying surprise.

Former and current Revels staff members acknowledge that the organization’s business model, with multiple full-time employees depending on revenue from one large show every winter, made maintaining the historic performance challenging. Brian Cook, Lebanon Opera House’s operating manager and former Revels executive director, says the arts community needs to tread carefully to ensure the company’s closure doesn’t become a “first domino.”

Revels’ funding struggles aren’t unique. As organizations have begun recovering from low attendance rates and limited community participation during the Covid-19 pandemic, news that the National Endowment for the Arts is significantly cutting grant funding, along with an ongoing effort in Concord to shutter the New Hampshire Council for the Arts, spell significant challenges for local arts organizations. For some of the Upper Valley’s smaller arts groups, limited funding and dried up spending are a threat to survival.

Yet regional arts organizations are persevering, and in many of their leaders’ eyes, thriving. One of the biggest developments in these groups’ successes, they believe, lies in collaboration, most visibly through the growing Upper Valley Arts Alliance.

As a collective of roughly 70 local organizations, the UVAA offers participants a space to trade ideas, promote one another’s upcoming events, and share resources. Shaker Bridge Theatre Managing Director Adrian Wattenmaker says the alliance gives organizations the chance to exchange vital and expensive gear for putting on performances, from costumes to headsets to microphones. If one organization has the funds to pay for a marketing professional, that person can share insight with smaller groups through the alliance, says Tracy Hutchins, the president of the Upper Valley Business Alliance, which encompasses UVAA.

“We don’t think of ourselves as competing with other (organizations),” says Johanna Evans, the Hopkins Center for the Arts’ film programming and operations manager. “We think of it as a rising tide, and that getting people interested and engaged in the arts at any of our organizations helps all of us.”

“Creativity loves density and variety. With density comes variety and diversity,” Lars Hasselblad Torres, AVAs new executive director says of local competition. “We don’t exist in an art silo. As Lebanon becomes a dense (arts) space, it's going to become even more vibrant.”

A brightening picture

Managing and maintaining community arts has never been easy. Many small nonprofit arts groups depend on donations, grants, and corporate sponsors to stay afloat. Add in the relatively small rural audience and always-uncertain financial support, and the steep hill these organizations have to climb becomes even more daunting.

This was, of course, all made more difficult thanks to the pandemic. Most local venues closed for at least six months. Even after they reopened, performances and displays had to evolve to suit social distancing. People feared going out and socializing. More fundamentally, says former Revels Executive Director Maureen Burford, audiences learned new ways to entertain themselves — mostly from the comfort and safety of their couches.

It took a while, but most local organizations have begun seeing much healthier attendance rates. Northern Stage has returned to pre-pandemic revenue. Cook says LOH has also seen similar gains, attributing these successes to a mixture of hyperlocal events like the Suzuki Showcase, where students from the Upper Valley Music Center perform for family and community members, and A-list performances, such as the already sold out Natalie Merchant concert coming to the opera house in November.

At AVA Art Gallery, Claire Geno, the gallery’s outreach coordinator, says pandemic adaptations have taught her organization new ways to display art, highlighting plans for increased outdoor programming and “Through the glass” exhibits. In some ways, the virus forced the arts to think about their work through new lenses, which has yielded unexpected innovations.

But there are plenty of reasons to worry.

On the other hand, just as Upper Valley arts organizations seem to be putting the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, political shifts in Concord and Washington D.C. have brought a new wave of challenges. In May, New Hampshire legislators voted to eliminate funding for the state’s Council on the Arts, which has been a crucial financial supporter for arts groups around the state. While Governor Kelly Ayotte and arts supporters in the State House have moved to bring in some funding — even if limited — the council’s future remains up in the air as a legislative conference committee debates the two-year budget.

These limitations aren’t unique to New Hampshire. The National Endowment for the Arts was expected to grant $2 million to NH’s arts council, but massive cuts in Washington to the NEA budget have thrown everything into uncertainty; arts groups around Vermont—including Northern Stage—have seen grants pulled.

Hutchins believes this is short-sighted. To call the arts a “want” rather than a need—as one Republican New Hampshire state senator did recently, suggests a lack of understanding for these organizations' concrete impacts in the local community and economy, she argues.

Citing an Americans for the Arts study conducted in the Upper Valley in 2023, Hutchins says the arts generated just under $19 million in expenditures in FY2022 — even with the pandemic still in play. And that study didn’t include some of the region’s biggest revenue generators, like the Hopkins Center for the Arts.

“It's very apparent when you look at what's happening in the Upper Valley, just how much the arts are contributing to the local economy,” says Hutchins. “If you try to get a table at Salt Hill Pub or Three Tomatoes when Lebanon Opera House has a show, it's almost impossible. They're full.”

There are benefits that go well beyond the region’s bottom line. Burford argues that the arts—especially live—are a crucial part of a healthy life. “It's not frosting on a freaking cake, it's not dessert,“ she says. “It is a main course in human development.”

Cook notes the importance of a strong arts presence in making the region an attractive place for families to live. “Folks are looking to live in communities where their families can really thrive and where their kids can have access to the arts,” Cook says. “They don't want to live in a cultural desert.”

According to the 2023 study, more than 300 people are employed by arts organizations in the Upper Valley, giving young families a reason to stay or move into the community. Cook believes this number is likely an underestimate, pointing out the movement of part-time workers, such as electricians, stage managers, and carpenters who work on shows for organizations across the region.

While acknowledging state budget realities, Cook argues that taxpayer dollars spent on the arts in New Hampshire boost the state’s economy. While efforts in Concord and Washington to cut a few million may help the balance sheet momentarily, they would cause a “ripple effect” for economic activity across both states.

In Vermont, similar concerns are on the table. Shaker Bridge Theatre, now based out of White River Junction, generates a third of its revenue from ticket sales and relies on grants and donations for the rest, Wattenmaker says. The company, which was based in Enfield before moving to the Briggs Opera House in 2023, has had to figure out grant funding in a new state amid NEA cuts. “We're in this situation where there's certain grants that aren't available anymore,” Wattenmaker says. “While it’s typical (for performing arts), tickets only only cover a small amount of operating expenses.”

And federal policy hasn’t just made funding harder. At Revels North, another challenge has been bringing in international performers, a central element of their winter show, which highlights music and dance from other cultures. With new barriers in place for work visa applications, Artistic Director Alex Cummings says the company has pivoted to local groups trained in Celtic dance and song for the troupe’s final performance in December.

The Hopkins Center faces similar visa challenges, Johanna Evans says: “We had some artists that we were hoping to bring in 2026. Sometime around February, we got the sense that their visas aren't going to work out, and the funding from these other countries to support these artists’ tours might be in jeopardy.”

Hope through togetherness.

Still, Evans, like many of her peers, says the most valuable discovery during the chaos created by Covid and recent funding cuts has been the tightened bonds among local arts organizations. While the HOP receives much of its funding from Dartmouth College, the arts center has been without its usual building in Hanover since massive renovations began in late 2022. As a result, most programming has been held at other venues, including Junction Arts & Media, Northern Stage, and churches in Hanover.

That kind of collaboration, along with a community that many local arts leaders believe stands out for its support of the arts, gives local arts groups hope for the future. It's never been an easy line of work, they say, and every year brings new challenges, but perseverance has its own benefits.

“Communities that have thriving arts organizations attract more families and people. The economy is boosted,” Burford says. “What gets fed in through the arts comes back.”

Duncan Green grew up in Plainfield and went to Lebanon High School. He’s now a rising junior at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, studying journalism and history, and served as news editor this past semester for The Daily Orange, SU’s independent student newspaper. He is Daybreak’s first summer reporting intern.