Temple Square’s Visitor’s Activity Center is Salt Lake City’s #1 tourist attraction.
A Utah state favorite, Hogle Zoo provides an oasis for 1,100 animals representing over 250 species from around the world.
The Utah Arts Council, building community through Arts & Culture.
The Grand Theatre has brought quality community theatre to Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front.
Abravanel Hall is home to the Utah Symphony and part of the Salt Lake County Center for the Arts.
The Utah Symphony has its home in Maurice Abravanel Hall
“
A
rt is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.”
– Saul Bellow
From the Utah ballroom dancers winning it all on “Dancing With the Stars” to the Five Browns burning the keyboards and tearing up the classical charts, to the Tony Award-winning Utah Shakespearean Festival, it’s almost as if Utahns drink in arts and culture with their water.
It must be something in the environment because almost as soon Utah’s early pioneers arrived they started building theaters with the same vigor that they built churches. Within a year of their arrival on the Wasatch Front, the Utah pioneers had built a social hall for concerts, plays and dances. This at a time when there wasn’t even one brick house in the Salt Lake Valley! The Utah Arts Council, the nation’s oldest state arts agency, was born in 1899.
And in the generations that followed came four Utah artistic innovators who have changed the face of modern culture and writ large Utah’s many contributions to the world of arts and culture.
Maestro Maurice Abravanel, founding conductor, Utah Symphony. By the time he landed in Salt Lake City to build what would be called the Utah Symphony, Maestro Maurice Abravanel had already been everywhere else and done everything a talented young conductor could do. Or so he must of thought.
He learned at the feet of the great Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet, dined with Igor Stravinsky, was a student of Kurt Weill of Mack the Knife fame, guest conducted at the Berlin State Opera and the Paris Opera, worked with Bruno Walter, developed an expertise with Gustav Mahler’s works, and like Willam Christensen, partnered with Russian choreographer George Balanchine.
When Nazi Germany began to prove inimical in the early 1930s, Abravanel and his wife left for Australia where he conducted a season each at the Sydney Opera and Melbourne Opera. He then made his way to New York where he spent time conducting Weill’s work on Broadway and spent another three years under contract with the New York Metropolitan Opera. But when in 1947 this vagabond landed in Salt Lake City, he came to stay. He took the helm of a part-time community orchestra and remade into respected professional orchestra with several prestigious recording contracts and an impressive list of firsts.
For all but one of his 32 years with the Utah Symphony the performances took place mainly in the acoustically-splendid, but monstrously-oversized and Spartan Mormon Tabernacle. So Abravanel acquired another skillset, fundraising and lobbying for a modern concert hall. An ingratiating and charming man he conducted his last season in the beautiful Symphony Hall, since renamed Abravanel Hall in his honor.
Under the baton of Maestro Abravanel, the Utah Symphony was the first to record all nine of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler whose reputation as a finest post-Romantic composer was advanced in no small measure by Abravanel and the Symphony. Abravanel and the Utah Symphony also made early and influential recordings of the Berlioz Requiem and works of Vaughn Williams. His life’s work also brought numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts in 1991.
Leslie Brott (left) as Volumnia, James Newcomb as Caius Martius Coriolanus, and Kate Cook as Virgilia in the Utah Shakespearean Festival’s 2007 production of “Coriolanus”
Fred Adams, founder, Utah Shakespearean Festival. The year is 1961 and a drama professor at the College of Southern Utah (now Southern Utah University) determined to bring Hamlet to the tiny hamlet of Cedar City. It wasn’t so crazy as it sounds. Even in the early 1960s tens of thousands of tourists made their way through Cedar City to the areas’ many natural wonders… six National Parks are within an easy drive of Cedar City. The locals grew up taking their milk with locally-produced dramas, oratorios, comedies and operettas. And who better to match the local scenic grandeur than Shakespeare?
Adams, an actor who had trod the boards on Broadway, went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, befriended its founder and came home with a valise full of notes. In 1962 the Utah Shakespearean Festival mounted a two-week season with The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. It generated $2,000 in tickets sales and attracted 3,726 spectators… enough to ensure a second season.
Now, 45 years later, the Festival runs from June to October, attracts about 150,000 people and has a budget north of $6 million. And the festival’s alumni (including crew) works from Broadway to Hollywood and in theater houses everywhere in between. The Festival won a Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre in 2000. And its outdoor stage… The Adams Shakespeare Theatre… replicates Shakespeare’s own Globe Theatre so authentically that the BBC filmed part of its Shakespeare series there.
Robert Redford, founder, Sundance Institute. By 1981, when he founded the Sundance Institute, Robert Redford’s reputation as an actor and auteur were already secure. He had sewn up an Academy Award as the director of Ordinary People in 1981 and had been a bankable star at least since the ground-breaking (and filmed in Utah) Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969. That same year, Redford purchased the underwhelming ski resort Timphaven and surrounding areas on the eastern slope of Mount Timpanogos in Provo Canyon, renamed it Sundance and began to make improvements.
The Sundance Institute came about to foster new, independent voices in American film and theater. Each year Sundance offers workshops, fellowships, conferences, and labs at Sundance have a long history of moving ideas onto film and into theaters and creating professionals out of unproven talent. Redford was the inaugural chairman of US Film Festival begun in Utah in 1978. In 1985 management of the Festival was assumed by the Sundance Institute and in 1991 it was officially renamed the Sundance Film Festival.
Now held each January in Park City, Sundance is the premier showcase for American independent film, and has launched the careers of independent filmmakers including Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, and Steven Soderbergh. Movies including Saw, The Blair Witch Project, El Mariachi, Clerks, sex, lies, and videotape, and Napoleon Dynamite all got their start at the Festival.
Willam Christensen, founder, San Francisco Ballet and Ballet West. “Ballet west of the Mississippi,” wrote dance critic Arlene Croce, “is pretty much the creation of the Christensen brothers — Willam, Harold and Lew.” The Christensen’s grew up in Utah, but their love of the dance took all of them to much larger stages. Willam, Mr. C. as he was fondly called, founded the San Francisco Ballet along with Harold and Lew when they bought the San Francisco Opera ballet from the Opera in 1942 for the princely sum of $900.
In 1944, to give his dancers income in the off-season, Mr. C. hunted down Tchaikovsky’s complete score to The Nutcracker and asked George Balanchine and his principal ballerina at the time, Alexandra “Choura” Danilova, to demonstrate the original choreography. They obliged him up to a point but then stopped when Balanchine reportedly said, “No, no, Choura, don’t show him the steps. Let him create his own choreography.” Mr C. did just that and since then from sea-to-shining-sea American ballet dance companies balance their books every year based on whether or not they had a good Nutcracker season.
Mr. C also staged the first full-length version of Coppelia and Cinderella. He founded the first classical dance major at an American university at the University of Utah in 1951. In 1963 he founded the Utah Civic Ballet (renamed Ballet West in 1968) in Salt Lake City, and built it into a renowned super-regional ballet company of 35 that has performed to rave reviews at the Chinese National Arts Festival, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Kennedy Center.
Willam Christensen, Robert Redford, Maurice Abravanel and Fred Adams are just the famous Utah names in the broader world of arts and culture. Along with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir their names represent Utah arts to the world.
But there’s a state full of other soon-to-be-famous arts and cultural offerings in Utah.
In addition to its own symphony and ballet, Utah boasts professional theatre, opera, and modern dance companies. Salt Lake’s galleries showcase compelling visual art collections, while museums preserve treasures of the past, including pioneer artifacts, military aircraft, prehistoric fossils, and fine art.
Visual Arts
The Muses have been kind to Utah. No matter where you look in the state your eye takes in the most spectacular scenery anywhere. Little wonder, then, that since the time when the Anasazi and Fremont Indians were committing their artistic flourish to rock faces all over the state, Utah has been a place where the visual arts flourish.
The Utah Arts Council maintains the State Fine Art Collection and mounts traveling art exhibitions cosponsored by museums, libraries, schools, and community centers across the state. The Council’s Visual Arts Program preserves and promotes Utah’s artistic heritage, collecting, preserving, documenting, and exhibiting much of the state’s heritage art.
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts on the campus of the University of Utah is home to the Intermountain West’s largest collection of world art. If your tastes are more eclectic still, try Salt Lake City’s Gallery Stroll. An average of 15 galleries participate each month, so the stroll represents a broad spectrum of artistic media and expression.
There are more than 25 art galleries and museums along the Wasatch Front, such as the Salt Lake Art Center; Springville Museum of Art; Museum of Church Historyand Art; and Museum of Utah Art & History.
Performing Arts
Like the pioneers before, Utahns today still love the performing arts. But instead of tiny Spartan social halls, Utah’s performing arts are showcased in facilities like the modern 2,800-seat Abravanel Hall/Art Center Complex and the plush 1,943-seat Capitol Theatre.
Since the death of Maurice Abravanel, the reputation and the quality of the Utah Symphony orchestra has attracted a veritable who’s who of conductors and guest conductors including Maestro Joseph Silverstein and its current musical director, Keith Lockhart.
Utah Opera… which in 2002 combined its management with the Utah Symphony in a bold move to bring Utah even higher artistic standards… has stirred the souls of Utahns since 1978. Together, the Utah Symphony & Opera serve more than 450,000 people in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Nevada, and reach out to 120,000 school kids annually.
Other notable performing arts in Salt Lake City include:
the Gina Bachauer Int’l Piano Foundation;
the celebrated Salt Lake Mormon Tabernacle Choir;
Ballet West;
Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company and The Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT);
the Children’s Dance Theatre; and
the Theater League of Utah.
Salt Lake’s major regional theatre, the Pioneer Theatre Company, is located at the “top of Broadway” on the campus of the University of Utah and offers Actor’s Equity performers in a mix of classics, large-scale musicals, dramas and adaptations by their talented artistic director Charles Morey.
The Salt Lake Acting Company specializes in nurturing local talent, especially playwrights, and has a famously raucous sense of humor.
Hale Centre Theatre at Harman Hall and The Grand Theater on the campus of Salt Lake Community College specialize in revivals and new favorites.
Teresa Anne Swain, Joyce Nolen, and Carolyn Hartvigsen in the production “Cinderella” at the Tuacahn Amphitheatre minutes from St. George
Numerous other local acting groups are found around the Salt Lake Valley.
Minutes from St. George in a stunning redrock setting, the outdoor Tuacahn Amphitheatre is the home to the annual Broadway in the Desert series, featuring productions of classic musicals, June - October. In Logan you can enjoy the Utah Festival Opera, founded and directed by another Utah original Michael Ballam, who performed with the Chicago Lyric Opera, the San Francisco Opera, and others.
Literary Arts
The “Dean of Western Writers” Wallace Stegner, who spent his late adolescence and college years in Utah, wrote knowingly of the state, “its distances were terrifying, its cloudbursts catastrophic, its beauty flamboyant and bizarre…” Like Stegner, a new generation of Utah writers are finding inspiration in the landscape and lore of Utah and American West and receiving national acclaim for their work. Readers and writers often gather at Salt Lake bookstores and coffeehouses to hear the works of emerging local and regional authors.
There are also a raft of writers’ conferences designed to make best advantage of the Utah landscape scheduled in the cool mountains of the north and the desert redoubts of the south.
Festivals
The Utah Arts Festival is Salt Lake City’s largest art bash
As befits its status as a world class destination and a first class x, Utah is the home to many festivals and celebrations.
Each January Park City becomes the world’s Mecca for independent cinema during Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival. The Festival attracts 50,000 visitors annually—and screens more than 125 dramatic and documentary feature length films and over 70 short films, selected from more than 5,000 submissions.
With annual attendance north of 80,000 the Utah Arts Festival, is Salt Lake City’s largest arts bash, and celebrates the visual, literary and performing arts, crafts, demonstrations, and children’s art projects.
Salt Lake’s multi-cultural legacy includes events like the popular Greek Festival, the Japanese Obon Festival, Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort’s Oktoberfest, and more.
Even before it was awarded a Tony, visitors to the Utah Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City knew they were attending one of the premier Shakespeare festivals. Now celebrating its 46th season, the festival’s runs from the end of June to the end of October staging 10 plays in three theaters.
The Downtown Farmers’ Market, a local growers market, delivers fresh-picked produce from more than 50 Utah farmers for an appreciative audience. The Market also offers a wide variety of fresh baked breads and pastries, meat and seafood, local cheeses, jams and honeys, and house and garden plants. Food vendors offer prepared foods and beverages. The Market runs every Saturday morning for 19 weeks at historic Pioneer Park in downtown Salt Lake City, from mid-June through mid-October.
Adjacent to the Downtown Farmer’s Market, the Downtown Art and Craft Market showcases the handicrafts and visual arts of more than 60 vendors each Saturday morning throughout the summer months.
Each May more than 500 artisans from 40 ethnic groups in the Salt Lake Valley share their heritage at Living Traditions: A Celebration of Salt Lake’s Folk & Ethnic Arts on the grounds of the City & County Building. This free three-day festival features continuing performances, crafts demonstrations and sales, and 20 ethnic food booths selling cuisine from their culture.
The West’s oldest continually-running arts festival is the high-altitude Park City Kimball Arts Festival, held the first weekend in August. The Festival is particularly strong on visual arts attracting 200 artists from across the West and more than 100,000 attendees.
The Film Industry
Since the 1920s, Utah has been ready for its closeup. As a result, over the last 80 or so years more than 700 films and TV shows have been filmed here. Filmmakers keep discovering Utah because of the scenic beauty, physical diversity, expansive landscapes, and impossible geography. Utah has been the backdrop for hundreds of films, shows and commercials.
In 2006 the film industry in Utah contributed nearly $144 million in the state’s economy through film related activities.
And like never before Utah ready in a second way. Utah has one of the most respected reservoirs of experienced human talent and production capacity in-between the coasts.
