The Fordham Road Blues Band performs in front of Nassau Hall, Princeton University at the Art People’s Party in April 1971. Today the Art People’s Party is known as Communiversity. From left to right are Tom Stange on sax, Chris Zaic and Sandy Bordash on guitar, Ricky Loman on drums and Joe Bordash on guitar.
Funnel cake: the squiggly fried staple of every street fair in America.
It’s never been difficult to see, or rather smell, why the sweet doughy treat remains a fixture on the streets of festivals across the land, extracting dollar bills from our wallets right under our noses. And at Communiversity, the Arts Council of Princeton’s annual signature event, there’s funnel cake.
But this is, you know, Princeton, and Princeton likes to have its funnel cake and eat it too. So while Communiversity has grown over the years to become one heck of a street fair, packing as many as 40,000 people into the streets of downtown Princeton for a day of fun, food, music and shopping, it’s billed as much more than that.
With attractions like the Princeton Symphony Orchestra’s “petting zoo” — where kids get a chance to handle the instruments they see the professionals play on stage — Communiversity is, and has been, looking to leverage the region’s robust base of arts and culture organizations to provide an experience that stimulates the mind as well as the ears, nose and stomach.
When Communiversity started, in 1971, it was known as the Art People’s Party.
“It was organized by and for artists — it was really an art event,” says Jeff Nathanson, who is executive director of the Arts Council of Princeton, where he’s been since 2005. “It started growing more as a street fair over the years, and the art and creative component started to become less important than the street fair, carnival aspect.”
When Nathanson came on board, he says, the event attracted about 15,000 people annually. The Arts Council started talking then about steering it back into the direction of being a creative community festival.
“We started to talk about, how can we steer this festival more toward something that really has more of a Princeton personality, and is attractive to artists and musicians and creative people and arts organizations and community-based groups,” he said. “To actually encourage community organizations to have creative activities. We didn’t want there to be a lot of people sitting at tables handing out brochures.”
Anne Reeves, founding director of the Arts Council of Princeton, says that would bring Communiversity closer to its roots. When the first iteration of the event was held in 1971—not 1970 as has been widely reported over the years—it was known as the Art People’s Party.
“It was very much a celebration of the arts, and so everything that took place had to do with creativity,” she said. “If you designed jewelry, you’d get a chance to see if people would acknowledge it and buy it. It was true with paintings, true with different kinds of music. The whole feeling was that of community and creativity, and it was just a lovely time for people to come out.”
Reeves said in the early days, the festival had an educational aspect to it, which is clearly something Nathanson is looking to recapture.
“It was, ‘How did you do that (dance) step, it looks very hard?’ ‘How did you do that guitar piece?’ It was a way of better understanding what arts and culture was here,” she said.
Though Communiversity has become more commercial over the decades, it seems clear that Nathanson has a vision of an event that, as it continues to develop, stays true to the aesthetic of the Art People’s Party. And if the Arts Council is successful in making that happen, Nathanson says, it will be largely through the efforts of its cultural and artistic partners.
“The marketing and participation in the event in recent years has been successful because all the different organizations and artists and businesses are doing their own networking, and their own marketing, and getting their own audiences to come,” he said. “We’ve been able to mobilize all the participants to get the word out. It’s become very grass roots.”
This year will be the first Communiversity to be held on Sunday, and that came about as a result of a request from the Princeton Merchants Association, whose members felt Sunday might be better than Saturday. Representatives from a variety of groups, including the Arts Council, the PMA, Princeton University, the borough and the Princeton Clergy Association got together and decided to make the move.
“It was a matter of trying to work with everybody and be cooperative and sensitive to everyone’s needs,” he said. “So far things seem to be falling into place really well.”
The partnerships, including the one with Princeton University, have been key to the growth and success of Communiversity in the past decade, and Nathanson is effusive in his gratitude. At the same time, he stresses that Communiversity is the Arts Council’s signature annual event, and he is always eager to ensure that people understand the role the organization plays in making it all come together.
“A lot of people support the Arts Council. We have a growing membership, we’re a successful organization. But we do a lot more for Princeton and the region than most people realize,” he said.
With a larger donor base, the Arts Council would be better able to budget for and plan events like Communiversity, as well as the dozens of other arts events they host or organize each year.
“We organized Communiversity as a break-even project for years, and we’re finally making a tiny bit of money, so at least we’re not in the hole,” he said. “But by no means is it enough is it to fund the organization. We’re a nonprofit organization. We don’t get municipal support in dollars. Certainly we do in police services and public works. But we are not a publicly funded arts council like many are, so we depend on contributions and memberships, and if people don’t know it’s us (that organizes Communiversity), they might not feel a need to support us.”
Communiversity takes place on Nassau and Witherspoon Streets, in Palmer Square and throughout the Princeton University campus. More than 200 artists, crafters and merchants from around the region are on hand and there will be continuous live entertainment on five stages. There are activities and games for children and a wide array of food. For more information, go online to your favorite search engine and type “Communiversity.”
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