Arts community weighs in on documentary in the making

Kristen Peterson, Las Vegas Sun

Friday, March 16, 2007 | 6:57 a.m.

After lugging her camera equipment around the Arts District, spending months interviewing key players and filming First Friday events, documentarian Marlene Adrian held a screening at the West Charleston Library on Wednesday to seek input from the community she interviewed.

Artists, shop and gallery owners and city employees turned out for the showing and filled out questionnaires afterward.

The documentary visits the days when the downtown Enigma Garden Cafe, open during the 1990s, was the home base for art, culture and community. It moves on to the early Gateway Art and Music Experience, an annual event that preceded First Friday.

Downtown tenants talked about First Friday's mostly positive influences on development in the area, the pros and cons of having a monthly party downtown and squabbles that have taken place.

At just under two hours, the documentary was a little long and repetitive, but as Adrian explains, "This is not the final cut. I'm still editing."

What Adrian captured well was a community desperately trying to build a vibrant urban core and sense of identity, something that happens organically in other cities. Players highlight the obstacles, the struggles and small successes, thus creating a valuable glimpse at the Las Vegas community.

Adrian expects the video, created as a project of Women of Diversity Productions, to be completed by June.

Saving the Stardust sign

For months there was some concern that the Neon Museum would not have enough money to save the 180-foot tall, 52-foot wide Stardust sign before the building was imploded this week.

The Centennial Committee gave $80,000. Boyd Gaming, which donated the sign, kicked in $100,000 to take it down and put it in the truck, says Rob Stillwell, a spokesman for Boyd.

But the museum was still short and struggling. At the last minute, it secured additional funds through the Centennial Committee.

The sign was dismantled and moved last month at a cost of $188,385 and sits at the Neon Boneyard.

"People don't realize how much it costs to move these signs," says Nancy Deaner, Neon Museum board president. "They weren't meant to be taken apart and moved. Workers spent days inside of the sign undoing electrical wires.

"Sometimes all we've got left are the signs in the Boneyard."

The museum is still looking for $1 million to reassemble La Concha, which is sitting in pieces on the property but will serve as an entrance and gift shop to the someday museum.

Composer conference

Seminars, concerts, master classes, oh my. UNLV will be buzzing this weekend with its first composers symposium and festival called N.E.O.N. (Nevada Encounters of New Music).

The three-day event celebrating new music brings in 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky from Cornell, Grawemeyer Award-winning George Tsontakis of Bard College and Paul Chihara of UCLA, who has composed more than 90 TV and film scores.

There will be free concerts tonight through Sunday in the Beam Music Center's Arturo Rando-Grillot Concert Hall. NEXTET, Virko Baley's new music ensemble, and ECCE, the East Coast Composers Ensemble, will perform.

For more information, call 895-2787 or go to music.unlv.edu/neon.