THE ARTS DALLAS’ WOLFTRAP

THIS IS THE story of a dream – a simple dream, really, made complex by the vagaries of law, politics and finance. The dream is a generous one -to give the Dallas area something it sorely needs: unspoiled open space. The site is north of Dallas, on the northern edge of Piano; it comprises 72 acres that may be within sight of Central Expressway but seem to be a million miles from the bustling city.

The name of this quiet place is Con-nemara, derived not as much from the rugged part of western Ireland bearing the same name as from Carl Sandburg’s Con-nemara, his North Carolina farm. Fields roll gently down to Rowlett Creek and its nearby groves of pecan trees. The slopes create a natural amphitheater, and the scattered stands of trees form isolated nooks amid the fields. This geography shapes some of the design behind the dream.

The plans for this dream vary. One in-volves doing nothing with the land, keeping it as a pristine, public nature conservancy, while the more ambitious idea would mean the creation of an arts park.

Connemara is the vision of Frances Williams, who inherited the farmland that her father bought in 1940. Williams says she’s afraid that young people today are being brought up with no sense of life beyond the shopping center. She wants to provide families with easy access to unspoiled space. “If the parents don’t know how to put on old shoes and go out to the country,” she says, “their children won’t. It will just be an asphalt society.”

Creating an arts park would combine the intrinsic value of open space with an untainted environment suitable for all sorts of artists – from solitary sculptors to entire symphony orchestras. Massachusetts’ Tanglewood, Illinois’ Ravinia and Wolftrap near Washington, D.C., are elaborate performing arts centers that have successfully mixed their spectacular settings with diverse arts offerings.

Frances Williams has visited these and other such facilities. But, she says, she found that “they all had the magic word: deficit. And they all had to have John Denver to pay for Mozart.” Williams doesn’t want to overreach and thus have to compromise the integrity of her park.

The alternative is to proceed with a less formal plan that would emphasize spontaneity rather than carefully scheduled programming. This probably means not dedicating the park solely to any single use, but trying to build an agenda of mixed-use programs instead.

While trying to define what Connemara is to be, Williams has been winding her way through the maze of political and legal issues that confront anyone attempting to give land away. Working with her daughter, Amy Monier, Williams has been looking for a way to govern and fund programs at Connemara. Williams is ready to give away the land (valued at a minimum of $750,000), but only if she is certain that its unspoiled nature will be preserved.

But turning the land over to a municipal parks department is risky. After a few months, the bulldozers might arrive to carve out soccer fields and tennis courts where there were once wildflowers and pastures. Parks departments and other government bodies often have trouble defending the preservation of unimproved land for the sole sake of having land. Even if Williams paid exorbitant lawyers’ fees, she would find it difficult (and perhaps impossible) to create a legal mechanism that would safeguard the land and still be acceptable to a local government.

Open-space preservation works best when it is part of a broader land-use plan. Why set aside acres of unspoiled countryside and then build a mammoth shopping center next to it? Large areas of green space should tie into smaller greenbelts that reach into other parts of the community. A stream running through park land should be protected not only on that particular part of its course, but also on the portion of its flow above the principal park area. This ensures that the park land will not include a stream-turned-sewer in its midst.

But politicians can be sensitive to such matters. Already, highway plans have been changed and protective zoning has been instituted to keep a shopping center and garish lighting from coming too close to Connemara. But the political maneuvering has not always been successful. A 1980 bond proposition to fund land preparation for an outdoor performing-arts facility at Connemara was defeated by Col-lin County voters. To date, no wholly practical plan for public funding and governance of Connemara has been devised.

Williams and Monier are determined to prevent their dream from being overwhelmed by politics. Rather than waiting for government financial aid or for some municipality to assume responsibility for the park, the mother-daughter team has created a private foundation to raise money for Connemara. In a community where arts fund raising is big business, the Connemara board has surprised some people by asking for only $150 in its solicitations. This is one way of letting the park program develop gradually. Monier says: “We’re going to have to sit down and figure out how much money we want. We don’t feel we’re organized enough to go out and ask for large amounts of money.” Connemara’s 1982 budget was a mere $15,000, much of which went to subsidize arts performances at the park.

Similarly, Connemara’s backers are not playing a numbers game with events at the park. “We’ve never been pushing audience development,” Monier says, “because we feel that’s going to happen on its own. We think that in the long term our problem is going to be too many people.”

But people who want to come to Conne-mara will have to exert themselves a bit. There is no parking on the property; cars must be left at one of three places (a shuttle bus runs from one of them). From the others, paths of one-half and one mile lead to the park. Connemara’s no parking rule exists, according to Monier, because “part of the experience of Connemara is the getting away from the city. We want to be the people who are willing to walk a half mile to get to the site.” Admittedly, this is a touch of naturalist-oriented snob appeal, but Monier hopes it will eventually develop a cadre of supporters committed to the board’s strong views about preservation.

All this may seem strange to most Dal-lasites. With no turnstiles to push through or plush sky boxes to sit in, Connemara is fighting the trend that ties the arts to luxury. But even if, initially, few people are ready to accept this approach, Monier isn’t worried about the park being underutilized. “I think our constituency will grow as the city grows and the lack of park land becomes more evident,” she says.

Transit, that ubiquitous Dallas-area issue, affects even Connemara. Williams knows that someday the area surrounding her park will be well-populated. A mass-transit line along Central Expressway eventually might run near Connemara. It certainly would make sense, she says, for a person in downtown Dallas to have access to public transportation that would allow him or her to leave the city quickly and travel to this rural refuge. Williams sees such easy access as a way to ensure a broad-based constituency for Connemara and still do so without clogging the area with private automobiles.

Whatever the future may hold for Connemara, its programming is likely to increase the park’s constituency. This spring, three Sundays will constitute a continuing festival. April 24 will feature sculptors at work and a performance by the Irving Symphony Orchestra; May 1, dancers from North Texas State University; and May 8, the Garland Symphony Orchestra.

Monier wants to spend most of the money raised at Connemara on subsidizing artists. Property upkeep is inexpensive because the people who come there respect the environment. Monier says, “We have never picked up a single piece of trash; people carry everything away with them.”

One of the Connemara board members is Mary McDermott, whose farm borders the Williams’ property. McDermott says that her involvement in the project is based on her wish “to save some green space for little kids who live in cement cities to see what it used to be like -at least a microcosm of what it used to be like.”

The evolution of Connemara offers several lessons. First, governmental assistance shouldn’t be wholeheartedly embraced. Some political interference (such as with tax and zoning) is inescapable, but offering politicians too much control over basic land use and programming decisions is asking for trouble. Connemara planners are now committed to keeping their venture within the private sector -while maintaining the necessary diplomatic arrangements with local governments -and being as self-reliant as possible.

Another principle of the Connemara effort is to follow Henry David Thoreau’s exhortation to “simplify, simplify, simplify.” With such a marvelous asset as the park land, the temptation always exists to create grandiose programs that would attract big crowds, big money, the media and the other accouterments of many arts enterprises. This would overwhelm the basic idea Williams started with: to maintain the naturalness of the land.

Perhaps the greatest test for Connemara, as its existence becomes known to more people, will be that of preserving its original goal of being a refuge for people who want nothing more than to find a natural retreat close to home.

As their credo, the friends of Conne-mara have adopted a passage from RalphWaldo Emerson: “He must walk in thewoods and meadows to restore his mindagain and reorient himself in the universe.”A simple ideal for a simple dream.