Bright Night celebration needs more support to survive

COURTESY BRIGHT NIGHT
BRIGHT IDEAS: Adam Gertsacov, festival director of Bright Night Providence, says that both corporate and government support for the event has waned.
COURTESY BRIGHT NIGHT BRIGHT IDEAS: Adam Gertsacov, festival director of Bright Night Providence, says that both corporate and government support for the event has waned.

It’s been nine years since a group of local artists led by Cranston native Adam Gertsacov took over Providence’s annual New Year’s Eve celebration when the organization that had been running the show folded under financial pressure. In that time, Bright Night Providence has weathered the recession and the loss of much of its public funding with a smaller, more intimate program of arts-focused entertainment. Now Gertsacov, who was the valedictorian of a Bryant College entrepreneurship program in the 1990s, is looking toward the future of Bright Night and how he can make the event self-sustaining.

PBN: How did this year’s Bright Night go?
GERTSACOV: I can already see that we did better than last year. We had better weather. I certainly don’t want to complain, but it had been advertised as even warmer. The joy of what you have is lost by wanting more. It was 45 [degrees] and beautiful. Nobody came with shorts, but it was definitely warmer than in past years.

PBN: What was different about this year’s event?
GERTSACOV: One of our big things was an afternoon event at the Convention Center: the Bright Night family fun fair. All of the things that were in it – face painting and performances and art exhibits – we have had them in one form or another, but this was a place where kids could go and was centrally located. It was something that people had been asking for.
The other thing that you had this year was a contest called Bright Night’s got talent. Four people won gigs, their first professional gigs. They performed at Bright Night family fun fair and that went really well.

PBN: Has the event become more or less child focused over the years?
GERTSACOV: We really try to balance it the best we can. Part of the mission for New Year’s is to create a family-friendly place, but we also have a fair amount of stuff for adults. We have sword swallowers and punk-rock bands and late-night dance concerts. We usually have a blues bash and comedy festival. This year we had renaissance music. Usually as the night gets later, it gets more adult.

PBN: Take us back to 2003 and describe how Bright Night was born.
GERTSACOV: I had … performed in most of the First Nights on the East Coast. In 2003, in September [First Night Providence] said they could not go forward and they gathered a group of artists to tell us and said, ‘Are there any solutions?’ We felt like maybe they were saying, ‘Can you perform for free?’ But we didn’t feel like it, not only because we needed to feed our families, but no one was going to ask the lawyers or anyone else to work for free.
We weren’t willing to donate it, but we said we will do it at lower cost and I think we can make this festival work.

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PBN: When you look back nine years and to the years ahead, do you see a trajectory for Bright Night?
GERTSACOV: We have grown and we were growing until the economy went haywire and then we had to cut back. In 2007, the budget was $150,000 and now it is $70,000. Some of that is we are not allowed to do fireworks anymore. Some of that was a wash, but we did have to cut artists and venues. Or goal is not necessarily to sell the most tickets possible, our goal is to have the best community festival possible that we can afford. … We need to think of a succession plan and become an ingrained institution. Right now we have one employee and that’s me.

PBN: Do you have a plan or model for growing the institution?
GERTSACOV: We have been working on that, but because the people we know are artists, it is hard to give up that little bit of control we do have. One of the things I feel strongly about is that our festival not become too big. We only sell 9,000 tickets, that way we can guarantee admission to one good show. First Night sold as many tickets as it could. They used to hire me to perform for people waiting in line to get into events. We want to sell tickets, but don’t want to ruin our customer experience. It doesn’t appear on our bottom line, but it is one of the more important things.

PBN: Have corporate sponsorships becoming a larger or smaller part of the funding mix compared with ticket sales?
GERTSACOV: We used to collect more in corporate funds and from the city and state. The city and state used to be the lion’s share of our donations. This year we haven’t gotten anything from the city, although we still hope to get something. When we started we got $25,000 from the city.
The state went from providing $10,000, to this year $4,810. We have lost 75 percent of our public funding. Compared with most nonprofits, our ticket sales are a much greater percentage of what we do, about 70 percent. Our festival is different because we are artist-backed. Everything is percentage based. In five of eight years I have paid out a bonus based on ticket sales. Last year was not a bonus. The last three have not been bonus years after the previous five were.

PBN: Is it easier or harder to survive as an artist in Providence these days than it was a decade ago?
GERTSACOV: The times are a lot tougher. A lot of artists perform in schools, but school budgets are getting cut and cut. There is definitely more going on in the city now downtown then there was 10 or 15 years ago. You used to be able to roll a bowling ball down Washington Street and not hit a car. Now you cannot find a place to park. The city has become a more vibrant place. •

INTERVIEW
Adam Gertsacov
POSITION: Festival director of Bright Night Providence and Boss Clown of Acme Clown Co.
BACKGROUND: An aspiring actor, Gertsacov took over organizing Providence’s annual New Year’s celebration in 2003 when First Night Providence dissolved. In addition to performing as a clown, he also runs a flea circus and wrote the coloring book Rhode Island A to Z.
EDUCATION: Bachelor’s in theatrical communications from the University of Pennsylvania, 1986; master’s in theater and group communications from Rhode Island College, 1990
FIRST JOB: Selling the Encyclopedia Americana door to door
RESIDENCE: Yonkers, N.Y.
AGE: 47

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