Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Staging a vision
Walton Arts Center’s Jenni Taylor Swain balances shows, audience.
FAYETTEVILLE — Jenni Taylor Swain knows her audience.
No single person has a greater impact on what appears on the stage of Walton Arts Center than Swain, the center’s vice president, programs. By its very nature, her job is one that requires a skillful balancing act.
Part of Swain’s job is listening to people in Northwest Arkansas and selecting shows and events that will resonate with audiences, then leveraging the trust built over the past 20-plus years to encourage patrons to take a chance on something new.
“The arts center would be very different today if it didn’t have that kind of nurtured and dedicated focus to quality that Jenni has insisted upon,” says Walton Arts Center president and chief executive officer Peter Lane of Fayetteville. “Jenni’s ability to deliver artists to Northwest Arkansas is a valued proposition that is rarely equaled in other organizations.”
Programming for an arts center is not a popularity contest. Audience input is critical, but it’s just a part of the equation.
Swain must have a deep knowledge of what’s going on in the industry, not just on Broadway but in all forms of performing and visual arts. It means frequently traveling, taking in shows and then determining whether they make sense for Walton Arts Center, artistically and financially.
It takes an understanding of your community — where it is today and where it hopes to be tomorrow.
“My own desire is to live in a place that’s vibrant and fun, which I think is shared by the people who live here,” says Swain, the arts center’s Tony Award voter. “People want to live in a vibrant place, and the arts play a really big role in making a place vibrant.
“It offers a community gathering place that’s unlike any other. You share it very collectively, but you experience it very internally.”
Swain is an intensely curious person, which is what
makes her a generalist. She’s not an expert in one particular art form, but knows a great deal about many. This is of great benefit to the arts center, as it results in a wide array of programming, and a sense that growth is always possible.
“I have never in my life met anybody more interested and curious about things than Jenni,” says Terri Trotter of Fayetteville, the chief operating officer of the arts center. “She wants to see and know everything, and that’s what makes her such an amazing programmer, because she’s interested in everything that’s going on. She’s always looking for something new.”
They’ve been together since 1991, the arts center and Swain, and they’ve grown together. The center has become a highly regarded destination where up-and-coming acts are introduced to an increasingly sophisticated audience, and where traveling Broadway shows will set up for a week at a time, like they do in muchlarger markets.
And Swain, the native Texan who came to Fayetteville via Paris and New York, has made a life here. She has raised her two boys here, in a community that offered them the opportunity to be exposed to different people and worlds.
It’s a place she helped mold, by traveling extensively in search of great performances, and then getting them to Northwest Arkansas when the time was right.
“I’m not trying to replicate anything,” Swain says. “I’m taking the best and then seeing if it fits here and then adapting it to how it works in our community.”
MANY ROLES
Swain is not a one-job-for-life kind of person. Really, she’s not. “Of all the people in the world, if someone asked me if Jenni would have the same job for 20 years, I’d have laughed, and said, ‘Absolutely not,’” says her husband, David Swain. “She enjoys changes and the challenges that come with change. But the beauty of the job she’s got is that the job has changed over the years.”
Technically, Jenni Swain has had more like a half-dozen jobs with the center since beginning as its education director. Ever since her first one, though, she has been involved in programming, adding to her responsibilities over the years.
Still, she says it feels like “a contradiction” that she has been with the arts center for 21 years. She came to Fayetteville a few years before accepting the position because she wanted to be closer to David, then a professional runner who had been an AllAmerican with the University of Arkansas.
David Swain is British, and Jenni dreamed of them being “an international love story, not living in Fayetteville.” But it turned out Northwest Arkansas was the right fit for them.
As Jenni advanced in her position with the arts center, she realized that the region was filled with people who were just like her — transplants living in an area where there were artistic opportunities for themselves and their children.
“Jenni loves connecting art with the community, and the spark that comes when people come in and learn something or feel something or smile,” Trotter says. “Not all programmers have that, where they know what’s happening, who’s doing good work, and they have an innate ability to figure out how and when that connects to their own community.”
Swain travels a half-dozen or so times a year around the United States and Canada to experience live performances. Some of these trips involve going to showcases, designed to introduce schedulers like Swain to multiple performances.
She estimates that of the works she sees, 90 percent of it doesn’t belong on her stage. When that happens, she’ll offer constructive criticism. Just because something won’t work in Northwest Arkansas next year, she says, doesn’t mean it can’t succeed five years down the road.
“She’s just so fun [to be on the road with],” says Vina Hyde of Kansas City, Mo., who was on the arts center’s board for eight years. “I learned such an abundance from those trips. It was such an education. ... But what really stood out for me was that I could tell she is a leader in her profession.”
When Swain does identify something that might succeed in Northwest Arkansas from an artistic standpoint, then she must determine if it will work logistically.
Sometimes the marketing and programming departments at arts centers are at odds, Trotter says, with the programmer choosing a show without regard to how the marketing side will be able to sell tickets. That has never been the case with Swain, Trotter says, noting she constantly communicates with the marketing team, keeping the staff on the same page.
Lane says there have been cases, such as the Trey McIntyre Project, a dance program, in which he was skeptical that the show could succeed at the center. Swain insisted they would work, and has usually been correct.
“The impact, the reaction of our audience, just blew me out of the water,” Lane says. “It was a case where her leadership, which I support, [benefited the arts center]. She understood it on lots of levels. It was a hole-in-one.”
JENNI GO
Swain grew up in Ingram, located in Texas Hill Country. Ingram is the home of the Hill Country Arts Foundation, and so Swain spent her summers walking a quarter-mile down the road to “The Point,” where she got involved with theatrical productions.
She performed in shows, singing and acting, but was just as eager to get involved with their production.
“It was pretty rural, Cowboys and Indians, close to the frontier,” says her father, Larry Taylor. “She was involved in a lot of activities [growing up], because she had a real curious mind.”
One group Swain embraced was the Future Homemakers of America, because it provided the opportunity to travel. She became a regional officer, which resulted in her flying all over Texas. As a state officer, she went to Florida and Washington.
“My mother always said my middle name should not have been Li, it should have been Go,” Swain says. “Jenni Go Taylor. ‘Where are we going to go? I want to go!’”
Swain earned a bachelor’s degree in organizational communication from the University of Texas, and spent a year in Paris, taking classes at the Sorbonne and exploring Europe.
Upon returning to the states, Swain lived in New York. Her move to Fayetteville was made reluctantly, and when she arrived, she didn’t know what to do with herself. So she enrolled at the University of Arkansas, where she earned her master’s degree in communication, with a focus on rhetoric.
Again, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do with the degree, but as it turned out, what she studied has helped her immensely at Walton Arts Center.
“When you study rhetoric, you’re studying how people respond to messages,” she says. “That’s what we do every day with the arts; we look at how people are responding to it. It’s not as much about trying to understand the artistic intent, but why is what’s happening creating a sense of connectedness or energy or emotional catharsis for people.”
DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION
A professor suggested Swain look into the new performing-arts center that was being built a few blocks from the university. She was one of the first people hired by the center, brought onboard as the director of education.
Her instructions were simple: She was told the goal was to have the center surrounded by yellow school buses, and teachers and students inside it.
She took the mandate literally. The first of her and David’s two sons, Aidan, was just a few months old when Jenni took him to a showcase, where he sat through dozens of performances over multiple days.
It was a harbinger of things to come for Aidan and the Swains’ younger son, Dominic. (Likenesses of Aidan and Jenni are part of the Ken Stout mural Intermission, which is on the second floor of the arts center.)
“Every opportunity she had to take the kids to the theater, she did,” David Swain says. “She wanted to grow their minds, to make them more well-rounded kids and grown-ups.”
Family time, making the most of her limited free hours, is important to Jenni Swain. She loves to cook a homemade meal, using whatever ingredients inspire her. If she spies an artichoke in her garden or at the farmers market, she can’t wait to make a dish with it.
“She didn’t have any interest in cooking when she was young, and now she has become a real gourmet-type cook,” says Swain’s mother, Nell. “She has such control of the meal. She cooks unusual things, she cooks curries and stews, and her salads are just out of this world.”
The meals Swain makes are opportunities to take her mind off her work. So is the swimming she does four days a week.
It’s meditative, she says, which is important to her. If she’s thinking about the 201314 Broadway season series — next year’s is already lined up — instead of the next swim stroke, she’s going to crash into the end of the pool.
When Swain’s swimming, she invokes the same level of focus she does to the arts center: Complete.
“She’s a great generalist, and so she does not let her own personal love or dislike of an art form play out her judgment,” David Swain says. “She’s able to set that aside and say what’s best for our audience in Northwest Arkansas, what would they really enjoy and what can stretch their cultural acceptance. She’s very good at balancing that.”