PPAC Awards

On balance, Sunday night's Pikes Peak Arts Council Awards were a success:

• The crowd at the Fine Arts Center's SaGaJi theater was the biggest in the awards' seven-year history.
• The proceedings moved along at a good clip.
• Though there were some surprising awards, that's the norm rather than the exception for this event.
• The nominee-provided musical and poetic interludes gave the evening texture, and made the awards more meaningful to outsiders.
• If you were one of those fortunate enough to win a PPAC award, you got a gorgeous enameled bowl made by Pat Musick that's certain to become an heirloom.
• And the champagne was decent.

Not bad for $20. But there's still a lot that could be done to make the evening a richer experience:

• The awards were given in a brusque, almost production-line fashion. The slides projected on the screen behind the stage were very helpful, but there were no film or audio clips of the winning performances, nor even brief descriptions of what made them stand out.
• In the case of (at least) the Lifetime Achievement Award winner - this year it was muralist Eric Bransby - a brief speech would be welcome.
• And if PPAC president Eve Tilley is going to be the evening's emcee again, she needs to be better prepared, both in terms of how to enunciate for a microphone and in how to pronounce all the nominees' names.

An unintentionally strange aspect of the ceremony was its parsing of performing arts groups, so that only one member of a a collaborative effort received an award when in fact it was the entire effort that was being honored.

If organizations don't collaborate, it's not a problem. But increasingly, performing arts organizations do collaborate, and the PPAC judging committees - and I was on two of them - have to do a better job of recognizing these hybrid productions. So "The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore" won awards in two categories without two of the three involved performing arts organizations - the Colorado Vocal Arts Ensemble and Colorado's Classical Youth Ballet - even being mentioned. To the extent that I was responsible for that oversight, I apologize to everyone who was slighted. We'll do better next year.