When the Fairfield Community Arts Center opened in 2005, the Footlighters not only found a permanent performing space, but a kindred spirit in the manager who came along a few months later.
Heidi Schiller came to the Fairfield Community Arts Center from Pensacola, Fla., where she was the business manager of the Pensacola Little Theatre.
“She is very knowledgeable about theater and the needs,” Davis said. “She’s made it a wonderful facility to work in.”
Since taking over management of the FCAC in December 2005, Schiller has guided the facility and the organization behind it to find its multi-faceted niche in the community and the region.
“She’s brought in a lot of different shows, applies for a lot of grants to bring in things we wouldn’t normally see,” Davis said. “There are more arts opportunities than just theater, especially opportunities for young people, and it helps the community in so many ways. It improves the whole arts scene and has become the hub of all arts activities in Fairfield.”
Schiller herself has been amazed at the growth and the variety of activities that have taken hold in the FCAC — everything from after-school ballet classes to a Wii bowling league.
“There are times when I leave the building late at night (and) see the whole building lit up, something going on in every room,” Schiller said. “There’s activity here all the time.”
Schiller not only manages the city’s “art hub,” but is also an active participant, having performed in Fairfield Summer Community Theatre shows, but also becoming a regular director for the Footlighters, this spring taking the helm on the comedy “I Hate Hamlet.”
Arts center becomes destination
When she moved to Ohio from Pensacola, Fla., Schiller saw the job posting for the arts center manager position before she saw the arts center.
“It was one of the first resumes I sent out,” she said. “It was perfect. I looked down the list of requirements and said, ‘I can do that. I can do that.’”
Chosen from a field of over 160 applicants, Schiller started at the center in December 2005, just a few months after it opened.
But the arts, especially the theater, have always been central to her life. She said as a child she loved to draw and paint, and took piano lessons for eight years.
When she was 14, her mother was looking for something for her to do for the summer and sent her to audition for the play “Snow White” at the Pensacola Little Theatre, where she landed a role as the lead characters right-hand maiden. “It was a great experience and I had just enough of a part to get bitten by the theater bug,” she said. “I’ve done at least a show a year ever since, give or take. I did a lot of community theater and got a degree in theater in college at the University of West Florida.”
After college, Schiller spent some time working for the off-Broadway 29th Street Theatre doing scene designs.
“I saw what New York actors really went through and decided that wasn’t for me,” she said.
She met her husband Bob in 1990, and as a Navy man, he took her off to Hawaii, where she got her M.F.A. in directing at the University of Hawaii before returning to Pensacola to become the box office supervisor, and eventually business manager, of the same theater where she started her career.
Her husband went back to school then and got a degree in graphic arts. He landed a job in Springfield at Lockheed Martin, which trumped her non-profit theater management job, so they came to Southwest Ohio. She took a year off, then started looking for work.
“Arts administration combines a lot of my interests,” she said, indicating that she not only enjoys the creative aspects of the job, but also the number crunching and marketing.
There are many aspects to her duties at the Fairfield Community Arts Center: Managing educational programs; renting the facility for receptions and other private events; working with performing groups such as the Fairfield Footlighters and the Miami Valley Dance Theatre, who use the theater and classrooms; marketing a broad array of performances not only to city residents but to the entire region; and overseeing exhibitions in the center’s art gallery.
“There was still a learning curve with the parks department and the city as to what the role of this building would be, how it would fit in with the community,” she said. “Balancing all of that was learning for everybody, but a lot of it was stuff I did as the business manager in Pensacola.”
One of her first tasks was to create a business plan, to shape the direction of the FCAC and help it move forward.
“It couldn’t be one thing or the other, it had to be a marriage of all these aspects,” she said. “One of the biggest things I looked at was marketing and that’s still a big part of my day, to get the word out beyond the borders of Fairfield so that we have a larger presence.
“As someone who is not from Fairfield, not from Ohio, I think I’ve brought a broader perspective and a professional sense of what’s good and what isn’t, and that’s helped us find a niche in terms of performances.
“I didn’t want to compete with the Fitton Center and I didn’t want to compete with the Footlighters because they’ve become our own theater group. You don’t want to bump heads, but fit in with the pack.
“So I brought in children’s theater because no one was doing that in our area, and I wanted to bring in different kinds of music, although world music was a tough sell.
“We’ve had some hits and misses as far as bringing in an audience, but we haven’t had a performer that people didn’t like.”
She said that she takes great satisfaction in seeing how busy the place has become. People migrate there just to hang out, sometimes.
“We have people coming in to sit by the fireplace and do their bills,” she said. “It’s a place where you can come and feel connected. We have seniors who come in every day on a schedule. We’re not a senior center and were not a children’s center, but something that is here for the whole community.”
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