By Vic Cox

Launched a year ago, the Embarcadero Hall-based variety show called “I.V. Live” looks like it is sinking healthy roots into Isla Vista’s fertile entertainment soil, reports Catherine Cole, associate professor of dramatic art and dance and creator of the initiative.

Not only is the weekly show, which features mostly local musical, vocal, comedic, and dramatic talent, packing the hall as the quarter progresses, but it is also generating welcome competition, according to Cole. The UCSB student-run comedy troupe Improvability has booked the Embaradero’s stage every Friday this quarter—after I.V. Live moved to Saturday nights—and is finding an audience.

With the Magic Lantern film series—it resumed last fall with D.J. Palladino as series producer—running two, well-attended shows on Friday nights, Isla Vista’s weekend entertainment spectrum has expanded significantly. “We exceeded our initial expectations,” said Cole, who has urged an expansive approach to performing arts in I.V. from the beginning.

Prior to I.V. Live, conventional wisdom, mostly based on low turnouts for one-show performances, was that Isla Vistans would rather party on weekends than go to shows. Cole, however, felt that regular programming was needed. She sought to make “attending cultural events a pattern, or habit, for students, much the way cruising Del Playa (Drive) is a habit.”

Cole knows it will take more than one successful year to develop the desired pattern. With financial aid from the administration, two part-time professional positions were established to support the film and performance programs. Cole has also worked to expand I.V. cultural arts programming’s academic connections beyond the departments of film studies and dramatic art and dance.

A new research subunit of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center has been established as Isla Vista Arts, and it will soon have its own Web site. Cole, who is IHC’s new associate director for Special Projects, will remain involved in I.V., though she has relinquished her Academic Senate position.

This quarter Cole turned over many of her I.V. Live administrative duties to Ellen Anderson, a Santa Barbara playwright. Anderson, who has been tracking the variety show since its beginning, describes her job as “the one constant” in a continually revolving group of graduate student producers and undergrad production crews that make I.V. Live possible each week. “I’m here as institutional memory,” she said.

Palladino, a veteran film reviewer for local media, also works with a student crew on the Magic Lantern film series at I.V. Theater. As producer, he enjoys mixing classic and recently released films to entice students to pay $4 a seat. Wrapping up this month, for example, are the “Wizard of Oz” and the Oscar-nominated “The Motorcycle Diaries.”