WOULD you believe an arts festival at Harvard? How about a celebration of spring entitled the Harvard Square Arts Festival, and a two-week-long cultural revolution that bears the name the Harvard Festival of the Arts? Both are happening during the first two weeks in May, when May Day will issue a new style of street action around Harvard Square. Harvard's own castle-keep at the Loeb Drama Center will serve as the middle of a series of concentric circles of creativity, blending to form one glittering puddle of theatre, music, dance and art that will inundate the University community in a wave of cultural events the like of which has never been seen or expected mongst our hallowed halls of knowledge and boredom.

This double-header in entertainment--the overall Harvard Square Arts Festival and the student end of the production, the Harvard Festival of the Arts--is scheduled for May 1 to May 14. Under its auspices, Cambridge citizens and Harvard students, Harvard Square businessmen and University officials will have a chance to realize, perhaps for the first time, that they are all part of one community that can work together to transform their common environment into an arena in which to celebrate the rites of spring. They will meet and mingle throughout the Square and the University in a 14-day orgy of opera and auctions, ballet and children's workshops, drama and kite-flying contests, cabaret and Festival sales at the Coop. The brick walls around Harvard Yard may come tumbling down to the vibrations of a rock concert, and colorful banners may break the drab facades of many a store-front--music and merry-making might even wreak havoc with the traditional apathy and antipathies that threaten to haunt the area....

PLANS for an arts festival were initiated even before school began this year. Instigators extraordinaires were F. Colin Cabot '72, president of the Harvard Dramatic Club, and fellow HDC board members Louise (Weezy) Waldstein '72 and Jon Miller '72. The three foregathered on September 7 at their favorite hangout, the Ha'penny Pub, to pool their ideas. Their motivation then was merely that they didn't want to have "a boring season," but the remedy against such an evil proved far more grandiose than they had at first imagined.

As veterans of many a Loeb season, they realized that it was about time to "open up the Loeb," to bridge the gaps between the Harvard Dramatic Club and the rest of the Harvard arts community--or what they wanted to think of as a community--and encourage as many people as possible to come work and play at the Loeb. Not only was the Loeb being underutilized, they felt, but the arts at Harvard were miserably fragmented. The concept of "Loebies" as an inbred group of theatre maniacs had not done much to make contact easier.

Every semester a whole melange of cultural events goes on at Harvard, but there has never been a sense of cooperation. Smaller groups suffer from lack of publicity; bad scheduling and communications create time conflicts. People were complaining increasingly about a lack of cohesiveness among the arts at Harvard: some were even skeptical that a cultural life existed at all.

The time seemed right to prove the faithless wrong, and a drive to widen the Center's narrow confines took over at the Loeb. A spirit of enthusiasm took hold and began to spread to include not only the rest of the University, but also inspired plans to branch out into the Cambridge community as well.

During September and November these all seemed just ideas and half-realizable fantasies. But soon plans began to take the form of action. The first administrative body to tackle was the Faculty Theatre Committee. "At first they were awfully suspicious," Jon recalls, "but we eventually convinced them that it would be a 'good thing'." Other parties were less trouble to persuade; the Music Department and the VAC were immediately receptive. In February, responses were still rolling in hot and heavy, Weezy delightedly called it a bit "scary."

The emergent schemes were indeed terrifying for anyone who likes to think that the creative and performing arts at Harvard are dead. The Administration could hardly believe its eyes and ears when Colin first approached Dean Epps with his ambitious proposals. In answer to requests for the use of the Yard, Cabot received a flat "no," but since then so many Festival dreams have materialized that the Administration seems to be offering far more cooperation--all to the University's advantage, one would like to hope, and an excellent way to patch up its damaged reputation where the community is concerned.

Meetings between the Festival's original threesome and groups such as the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. The Harvard Advocate and the Leverett House Opera Society produced more and more positive results, and by December, scheduling was definitely coordinating the HDC's usual theatre slots with the performances planned by the other organizations. At the University level the problems remained, but with endless enthusiasm, mysterious energies and cool-headed planning, these obstacles have gradually vanished.

WHEN Colin, Weezy and Jon decided to expand the Festival out into the Cambridge community, they didn't quite know where to start--or even if they should. The question was, as Colin put it, "Do you believe in the Harvard Square environment and is Harvard part of it?" The need has long been felt for a bond between college-based artists and community-oriented groups. Such new and exciting contacts would demand breathing space and room to spread to fabulous extremes if need be--"To use the streets, you have to have the support and interest of the people in them," Colin realized. Wouldn't the merchants and community groups around the Square be more than he and his co-workers could handle? They were up to their ears working on the Harvard Festival of the Arts, and yet feedback on their larger ideas was so strong that they were set on rechristening their unborn brainchild "The Harvard Square Arts Festival."

They first heard from Howard W. Davis of the Harvard Coop, who had been approached by Bruce E.H. Johnson '72, a member of the Festival steering committee. Davis, who calls the whole scheme "wonderful," referred Colin and Bruce to Harvard Square's Planning for People Committee and the Harvard Square Merchants' Association. The University-based program was already definite by that time, and this enabled the Festival organizers to offer a grab-bag of creative drawing power to the Square vicinity. Despite some hassles about the use of Brattle Walk and the ultimate decision not to incorporate it into Festival area (many merchants feel the Walk has been hurting their business), offers of facilities and material support came readily enough. To make prospects even rosier, the idea of the Festival has met with support from Cambridge Mayor Barbara Ackermann and the Cambridge City Council, while the Chamber of Commerce also wants to get in on the act.

As this unprecedented coalition of students, artists, architects, merchants, citizens and cultural groups grew in format, the student steering committee found over the past month that it threatened to spread its energy and attentions too thin. That's when current Harvard Square Arts Festival coordinator Kristen Wainwright appeared on the scene--"a godsend," Bruce calls her--to help organize the community side of the Festival. With the experience of coordinating the 1971 Great Boston Kite Festival and serving as assistant director of the Children's Museum Visitor Center last year, Kristen is cut out for her present crusade.

One of the first things she did was to solicit sponsorship for the Festival from the Committee for the Better Use of Air, thereby ensuring the Festival a tax-exempt status and emphasizing its ecological sympathies. "Through the interaction of the community, artists and students, along with the celebration of spring," she says, "the many disparate elements of the Cambridge community can be brought together to heal the scars left by many unhappy and neglectful years."

The goal of the Festival has now become a manifold effort to improve the cultural climate of the Harvard and Cambridge communities, and to reinforce this by the free and fanciful use of the environment. The spirit pervading the Festival should be, in Weezy's words, "doing as well as seeing."

WHEN ONLY A SHORT TIME left until the Festival opens, the Loeb itself is humming with rehearsal fever. On the mainstage, Liz Coe is directing Moliere's "Imaginary Invalid," the first play she has directed which is not twentieth century. In her production of "The Imaginary Invalid," Coe has fused her directorial and authorial talents by integrating three translations to compose the script, "to depart from the stiff, dull and awkward seventeenth century prosaic speech patterns to which the academic translators feel committed. But this departure from the sacred script," she goes on to explain, "is just an extension of the motif we have followed in every aspect of our production: anachronism." As she firmly guides the rehearsal she interjects suggestions that let her cast experiment with tones ranging from starkly modern to flamboyant seventeenth century.