Quick Take:
Ripple Effect, a new, creative arts festival covering the entire county, officially launches on Thursday. It will feature a wide range of activities involving visual and performing arts, film, photography, and much more.
So, what exactly is this “Ripple Effect” thing we keep hearing about?
Is it some faddish new surfing-adjacent watersport? Or, the hip resurgence of a long-extinct rotgut wine product? Or, maybe the latest Dead cover band?
None of the above, it turns out. It is, in fact, a new creature on the Santa Cruz County arts scene that, if successful, could one day become a buzzword everybody is using. After all, there was once a day when no one had ever heard of “Bonnaroo” either.
Ripple Effect is a new, out-of-the-box arts festival covering the whole of Santa Cruz County, to launch on Thursday, April 16. It will embrace a wide variety of the visual, the literary and the performing arts for 11 days, culminating in a big bash on Sunday, April 26, featuring a live performance by Florida singer/songwriter Helado Negro at The (what oldtimers still call the Cocoanut) Grove.
Sure, it’s several degrees more modest than, say, Coachella, the behemoth SoCal festival also claiming mid-April as its own. But at a ribbon-cutting event last week at the MK Contemporary Art gallery in downtown Santa Cruz, the event’s co-director Melissa Kreisa conjured the C-word in her remarks.
An arts festival, said Kreisa, “invites new energy into a place and creates shared experiences. Festivals like Coachella and [high-profile country-music festival] Stagecoach generate more than $700 million in economic activity for their region. We’re just beginning. But it’s a reminder what’s possible when a community comes together around the arts.”
It’s also a reminder that — despite convulsive changes and potentially transformative development over the last decade and the long gradual fade of the hippie subculture that largely established the “Keep Santa Cruz Weird” creative community a half-century ago — there remains a talented, ambitious and restless cohort of artists and creatives ready to make an impact on whatever new swan Santa Cruz is becoming.
But rather than one big-ticket stage show, Ripple Effect is more of a prevailing vibe across an enormous range of venues and dates at events that have little else in common. It’s an experiment in community building to see if a wide variety of local arts organizations, each master of its own fiefdom, can work together to make a whole larger than the sum of its parts. And, it’s also a branding exercise, inspiring new shows and events while attaching its name to a number of arts and performance events that would have taken place anyway.
Of course, variety is the point. Ripple Effect will extend its umbrella over an astonishing array of local activities — visual art, dance, music, theater, photography, lectures, stand-up comedy, poetry, film, fashion, even a trivia night about art and soap bubbles at sunset at Lighthouse Field. It all begins with a jolt of energy, the Dancing in the Streets event that has been enlivening downtown Santa Cruz every spring for 17 years. And the ripples radiate out from there.
More than 80 local arts/cultural organizations are participating in a project that dates back two years in its conception and planning. The germ of the idea came via artist and curator Rose Sellery, who applied for and received a grant from the city’s Economic Development partner to start a festival, originally to be a one- or two-day festival at the Tannery Arts Center. Later, over margaritas, Sellery met her friends Melissa Kreisa of MK Contemporary Art and Marla Novo of the Museum of Art & History (MAH), and the festival idea ballooned into something bigger.
“We have so much here throughout the entire county, from UCSC to the Pajaro Valley,” said Sellery, remembering that margarita session. “We are rich with what all these arts organizations in this county are putting together, but we’re all working in different silos. We thought, ‘Why aren’t we an arts destination? We should be an arts destination. Let’s do something about it.’”
Kreisa has long promoted the idea that Santa Cruz should be known throughout the region, maybe even across the country, for its arts and creative environment.
“Santa Cruz exists in its own bubble,” she said. “There are so many supporters and patrons of the arts here, but outside of Santa Cruz, we’re just not known like other places such as Santa Fe or Carmel. But our arts are better. We’re better!”
Inclusivity was also a by-word for the festival from its beginnings. Watsonville, for example, has seen its own boom in arts activities since the pandemic. And, on April 18, the downtown Watsonville Center for the Arts will host its own Ripple Watsonville event. The Festival has also allowed artists to create their own events. When celebrated wildlife photographer Frans Lanting wanted to host an early morning “photo walk” at Lighthouse Field, the festival paired him with dancers from Motion Pacific, creating a 6 a.m. date on the festival calendar April 18.
The city, Arts Council Santa Cruz County, and the Community Foundation are all supporting the effort as well.
Christie Jarvis is a local artist, landscape architect and curator who runs the Minnow Arts gallery in downtown Santa Cruz. She was an early supporter and volunteer organizer for Ripple Effect. She pointed to the growing popularity of the First Friday art tour as an indication that Santa Cruz County’s arts culture is again blooming post-pandemic. Five years ago, when she first opened her gallery, First Friday crowds were thin. “Now,” she said, “you can hardly get in the door.”
Jarvis had originally considered opening her gallery in Santa Monica. After deliberating on a more favorable location, she chose Santa Cruz after determining that its arts culture was richer, larger and more vibrant than that in, say, Monterey or San Luis Obispo. She sees Ripple Effect as a new way to channel passion for the arts in Santa Cruz, and create a brand awareness of the community as an arts haven.
“People think of Santa Fe as this arts destination,” she said. “But, really, Santa Cruz has all that, but people don’t necessarily think of us in the same way as Santa Fe.”
Composer Riley Nicholson is in his third season as the executive director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, and is part of a new generation of local arts leaders that has emerged since the pandemic. Nicholson joined in the Ripple Effect effort to make connections between arts organizations, to play matchmaker between artists, venues and presenters. “The goal was to underline some of the work that’s already happening, and then put it under the umbrella of Ripple Effect, to really elevate what’s happening.”
The new festival also allows producers like Nicholson to populate different parts of the annual calendar. The Cabrillo Festival is a mid-summer event, but Ripple Effect allows it to get in front of audiences in the spring. The Cabrillo Fest is partnering with the UCSC Music Department to present “A Change is Gonna Come,” a showcase of the American protest song tradition at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center on April 24. Similarly, Santa Cruz Shakespeare — which in recent years has expanded its summer offerings into the fall and holiday season — drops into the spring with a one-person performance of “Vincent,” opening also on April 24.
As they mature, arts festivals are often subject to changes in focus and character, and there’s no guarantee that what Ripple Effect looks like in 2026 will resemble what it looks like in, say, 2036, if it survives that long. The new festival’s organizers are allowing for that kind of serendipity, a “let’s see what happens” approach that focuses less on controlling the festival’s direction and more on unleashing the creative energy of the arts community as a whole.
“We hope to be laying the foundation for something that outlives us,” said Melissa Kreisa.
At the new festival’s ribbon cutting, Santa Cruz mayor Fred Keeley emphasized that Ripple Effect could grow into something that few of us are envisioning now. Presuming that, in the next decade, the hundreds of new housing units in downtown Santa Cruz will be populated by new residents eager to take part in a new community, the ripple effect of Ripple Effect could reach a long way.
“What you are engaged in right now,” said Keeley to the assembled crowd, “is absolutely the future of the city of Santa Cruz, with thousands of new residents living here who want, by choice, to be in this environment, who love the arts and who love culture. And this evening, this spark is going to burn like wildfire — in the best sense — to create a hot new dynamic community in downtown Santa Cruz.”
The Ripple Effect Festival takes place April 16-26 in venues around Santa Cruz County.