A few people have wondered why this event was off campus. "You Belong to Me" was sponsored primarily by the University of California Humanities Research Institute. They have an "Extramural Collaborations" grant specifically designed to support Humanities programming off-campus - sponsoring events that "export" ideas and concepts developed within an academic environment into non-academic spaces. Given the explicit/challenging nature of some of the performances, some have wondered if this happened off campus because UCR was nervous about doing such a thing on campus.
To be honest, it would have been a lot easier to have staged Saturday's event in a black box theater on campus. But: access to space on campus is limited - hard to gain access to and very expensive. And, on campus we would not have had the audience that we had - plus the programming would have felt like it was "for" an academic community. Same goes for a gallery space - we might have done this at The Sweeney Gallery, but circumstances required we stage everything elsewhere: they took on their co-hosting role after their exhibition calendar was set. (If you see the show on exhibit in their main space now - Your Donations at Work - you'll see that there is no floorspace.) Anyway, figuring out the space and place of "You Belong to Me" was one of its biggest challenges - and it was the explicit challenge of the grant, which required we do as much as possible off campus. In the end I was really happy with what we came up with - people stopped by all weekend to check out what was going on, and seemed grateful to have some activity and people in the space. I look forward to the opening of the Culver Center on the other end of the pedestrian mall, and hope to see more university-generated programming that appeals to our neighbors in all their freaky Inland Empire glory.
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