Linda Haines
Kids are performers — they play guitar, pound the piano, sing, rhyme and rap, dance, dramatize, beat the drums, hoot on the sax. And for a decade now, teens who want to display their talents in Ridgefield have had chances to do it — stages to stand on, people to listen, audiences to applaud. Linda Haines has seen to it.
RMAC, the organization she founded to support student performers, has run concerts and coffeehouses, held band battles, sent kids out to play in front of town hall for Main Street shoppers on Friday evenings through Ridgefield’s leafy, lazy summers.
“We’ve tried a lot of things over the last 10 years,” she said.
“Music Fest in Ballard Park, that’s our biggest one. Usually that draws about 1,000 people throughout the afternoon.”
RMAC, originally the Ridgefield Music and Arts Center, will undergo a transition as 2015 gives way to 2016, with Haines stepping down and the leadership of RMAC’s adult board going to Maureen Chakraborty — whose daughter, Lauren Chakraborty, is current president of RMAC’s student executive committee.
“After 10 years, I feel it’s time,” Haines said. “For any organization to be successful, it has to be able to sustain itself beyond its founder. Maureen Chakraborty has been involved with RMAC for a while as a parent, board member and treasurer and is ready to take over. I am confident RMAC will continue to thrive under her leadership.”
RMAC was created to handle a need.
“In 2005, when RHS held its Battle of the Band auditions, 17 bands tried out for six coveted spots,” Haines said. “Those who were chosen got to perform a 20-minute set once. It was obvious there was a need for more performance opportunities to get musicians ‘out of their garage.’
“As a teacher at Scotts Ridge I noticed the talents that the kids have,” she said. “Not just the battle of the bands, but also seeing the kids perform in my school — whether it’s the talent show, the school play, or the music concerts — reaffirmed the need for an organization like RMAC to provide more opportunities for the students to perform.”
Her younger son, Kevin Haines, was a freshman at the high school then, and played in one of the 17 bands that tried out for the 2005 Ridgefield High School band battle. He became the first student president of RMAC and went on to study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
“He embraced RMAC with the same passion and commitment that I did,” Haines said. “I got a lot of my energy and ideas from him and his friends.”
Kevin graduated from RHS in 2009, but Haines’ involvement with RMAC continued.
“I was still very passionate about the organization and the benefits to all students,” she said.
A decade later, RMAC’s still putting on shows once or twice a month — most often at St. Andrew’s Church off Ivy Hill Road, where RMAC collaborated with the congregation on renovating the old church as performance space after the new church was completed. And there are other events RMAC organizes, like an annual art exhibit and a poetry event called Word.
“The most popular event is Music Fest, generally held in May in Ballard Park. Anywhere from 16 to 20 musical groups, ranging from solo performers to full bands, play a set on one of the stages,” Haines said. “Band Bash is another event that has gained in popularity again in the last several years, especially since RHS no longer hosts a Battle of the Bands.
“Finally RMAC ’n’ Cheese is a popular night event held on Main Street during the town’s annual Holiday Stroll.”
Years back, RMAC had bands in front of town hall Friday evenings through summer, originally called Fridays at Five and then Songs at Six, and designed to support businesses that were trying to stay open later to develop evening trade. More recently RMAC sponsors two Main Street performances most summers.
RMAC has always been a collaboration between students and adults, and when it started in 2006 the six kids on the student board worked tirelessly to get the organization up and running.
“The difference was, RMAC was their main thing. They weren’t involved in 10 different clubs,” Haines said.
“Today there’s 29 on the student committee.”
Students may take part in performances, get involved in organizing one event or another, or just help out all along.
“It’s a little different the way we work, it’s not like a group you join and you’re in or out. You might want to participate in an open mic night, and you sign up, and you might not want to be involved in anything again until May,” Haines said.
“It’s a very fluid group of performers. A lot of kids on the committee are performers themselves and they often perform, but each event seems to bring in a different group of students, in addition to the student committee.
“We go beyond Ridgefield’s borders. We always have,” Haines added. “In the beginning we did things with Danbury … the kids would go to neighboring towns and hang flyers a lot.”
RMAC works with a number of institutions in town to organize events and find venues for performances.
“We partner with the library, with the Aldrich, the rec center. We’ve partnered with them for various things,” Haines said. “We’ve used the Scotts Ridge stage and East Ridge Middle School stage, the Playhouse stage.”
RMAC has a tradition of providing student performers for community non-profit groups’ fund-raisers and special events.
“It creates a win-win. The organizations get free music, and the students get opportunities to practice their craft,” Haines said.
“Mel Bresnan, a Berklee College of Music graduate and songwriter currently living in Nashville, was one of the original members of RMAC. … She said RMAC provided her with over 30 opportunities to perform during her high school years.”
RMAC awards an annual scholarship to a graduating RHS senior.
At first, RMAC’s goal was not just to organize events but to create a performance venue for kids.
“The original mission was to build a venue, with the train station on Ridgefield Supply property,” Haines said. The run-down Victorian stationhouse was going to be relocated to a site near the back of the municipal parking lot off Governor Street, near the Boys & Girls Club.
That proved overly ambitious, and RMAC focused on organizing events at existing venues, from the regular performances at St. Andrew’s to the big outdoor bash at Ballard Park each spring.
The post RMAC’s Linda Haines, steps down appeared first on The Ridgefield Press.