Behind-the-scenes work garnering rave reviews
Multicultural approach suits ASU events chief
DIMITRI DROBATSCHEWSKY
Special to Jewish News
Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, Arizona State University's executive director of public events, came up with the idea for the recent L'Chaim Series of performances and lectures celebrating Israel's 50th anniversary.
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"She is a creative and dynamic person who has brought a tremendous commitment to taking the arts out to the community, involving more people of different backgrounds and in different ways than anyone I've ever met," said Rabbi Barton Lee, director of the Hillel Jewish Student Center at Arizona State University.
"She has a passion to convince others that all the arts are vitally important, and she has brought to ASU things that we would never have had a chance to see, by making lucrative Broadway musicals pay for the less popular programs," said Shelly Cohn, director of the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
The passionate arts advocate that Lee and Cohn are describing is Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, the executive director of public events at ASU, a nationally recognized and distinguished arts presenter who in 1994 was appointed by President Clinton to the National Council on the Arts.
The recently concluded L'Chaim Series, a seven-event music and lecture festival honoring Israel's 50th anniversary, was Jennings-Roggensack's idea; she committed ASU to join Hillel and others and was instrumental in putting it all together.
Jennings-Roggensack already was a seasoned arts administrator when she came to ASU (from Dartmouth College) six years ago. Her involvement with the performing arts began early in life with ballet lessons and an ever-growing passion for dance.
"But as soon as I started to dance, I realized that I wasn't going to be dancing my entire life, that it was a limited career," she said. "So, what I wanted to do was stay close to dance, and the best way to do that was to do dance presentation."
Her first mentor was Shelton Stanfeld, now the chief executive officer at the Woodruff Center in Atlanta, where the Atlanta Symphony is at home. He also has managed the Wolf Trap (Music Festival) and the Los Angeles Music Center, among others.
"Stanfeld knew that I had a passion and a knowledge and a good understanding of the dance," Jennings-Roggensack said. "He knew that once that gets into your blood, you cannot let it go. But that was as far as it went, and everything else (I learned) came from him.
"At Colorado State University, he taught me to administer the performing arts, and he gave me my first job. He also taught me to read a lot, biographies mostly, and to learn about the people and their backgrounds, and how they came to their work.
"We had a strong chamber music program, a great film program and a terrific theater program," Jennings-Roggensack continued. There she worked with John Houseman and the Acting Company for six seasons, describing Houseman as a "wonderful human being who sent me holiday cards until the day he died."
The woman who went on to coordinate ASU's L'Chaim Series is not Jewish, but she has been to Israel twice.
"About three years ago, I had a conversation with Rabbi Lee and Shelly Cohn about what we would do, what we could do for the 50th anniversary celebration," she explained. "I must say that I curated a major program at Dartmouth for Israel's 40th anniversary, and here, I had just come back from Israel."
Plans for the L'Chaim Series matured into unexpected shape when Jennings-Roggensack went to New York to see the new musical "Bring In Da Noise - Bring In Da Funk."
"There was a producers' meeting," she recalled, "and all of a sudden I hear someone in the theater yelling 'Colleenushka!' It was David Eden from the National Jewish Foundation, a Russian Jew and a good friend of mine. He insisted that I accompany him to a late post-performance supper at the residence of the Israeli ambassador, insisting that 'I'd know everybody there.' I did know a lot of people, including Letty Cottin Pogrebin (the founder of Ms magazine), and we had a lengthy talk during which I asked her to come speak to us in Arizona. Everybody was asking what we'd do for the 50th, and that's really where the seeds (of) 'L'Chaim' were planted.
"When I came back from New York, I met with Barton (Lee) and Shelly (Cohn), and we brainstormed about not just having it be music - which would be fairly simple - and not just about performing arts, but also with serious discussions being a part of it. We did want to open with a star, however, and that's why we had Itzhak Perlman.
"Numerically and financially, 'L'Chaim' was a success," Jennings-Roggensack said. "A lot of organizations supported it, including the Jewish News and the federation, and we also received great support for individual events from different companies, such as America West, a result of the efforts of our main solicitor, Pat Alberti, who must have talked with a million people."
Speaking about the involvement of ASU and the community, Jennings-Roggensack recalled that "when I arrived here, there was not a strong connection between our public events and the community. It almost was as if we were in isolation. I am convinced that if the arts are to take hold in America nationally, they must be rooted in the community, and that people at the grass-roots level must have a commitment to music, to dance, to the theater. What I foresaw already then was that we needed to create relationships and partnerships with the various communities, so that the arts would be rooted there."
Jennings-Roggensack talked with leaders of the Hispanic, Native American, Jewish, Asian and African-American communities and established connections, not only through performances on ASU stages, but right in the schools where the artists would spend time, in addition to their performances.
"We were successful, and now we all benefit from this," she said.
"She has this incredibly strong sense that, on one hand, each community is unique and different," says Rabbi Lee, "but that out of that unique and distinct artistic expression coming from the different communities, there also is a universal language."
Sums up Cohn: "We are very fortunate, indeed, to have her in our community."
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