It’s true that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But try telling that to the hundreds of people who streamed into the University at Buffalo’s Center for the Arts on a sunny late August afternoon to scarf up complimentary hot dogs and cookies. The performance venue’s annual “Center Celebration,” which marks the kick-off of its season of music, dance and comedy performances and literary readings, has become an annual fixture on the university’s North Campus.

Of course, Center for the Arts staff were hoping all those free Sahlen’s dogs would result in a bump in ticket sales, revenue from which fuels the center’s increasingly impressive array of services and initiatives. Under its director, Tom Burrows, the organization has been handing out the artistic equivalent of a free lunch to Western New York’s students and community members for the past 14 years.

The Center for Arts model, examined up close, mirrors that of many successful arts organizations in larger and more economically vibrant regions. Since Burrows took over operation of the venue in 1996 (it opened in 1994), he and the center’s staff have been drawing a series of big-name touring acts, from Ray Charles to Wynton Marsalis to David Byrne.

With earned revenue from these events, the center has been able to fund deeply substantive and community- focused programs like its annual dance residency, which brings major dance companies to town for a week of free performances at local schools, workshops with the university’s own dance program and often to work with the center’s lauded Arts in Healthcare program at Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Women and Children’s Hospital.

It’s the familiar old philosophy espoused for most of his career by Neal DuBrock, onetime visionary director of the extinct Studio Arena Theatre: Strike a workable balance between bankable attractions and your own personal artistic vision, but never sacrifice quality in the name of profit.

Burrows has overseen the center’s slow but steady evolution from an unloved venue that many once feared would sound a death knell for Buffalo institutions like Shea’s Performing Arts Center and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra to a suburban temple to the arts that’s become vital to the cultural life of Western New York in some surprising ways.

“It’s not a very exciting story,” Burrows said, with typical modesty. “There was a lot of resistance to this place at the very beginning. People didn’t see the necessity for it and they didn’t want it. They had to be worn down.”

Now, even the most obstinate of culturally conscious Western New Yorkers would be hard-pressed to argue against the center’s impact.

In a region not especially known for its offerings in dance – though that’s beginning to change – the Center for the Arts has been ground zero for dance in Western New York since Burrows came on board. Its slow but assured work toward fostering a local audience and appetite for dance is beginning to pay off, as this summer’s second annual Buffalo Dance Festival proved.

Its Arts in Healthcare program, adapted from a similar project in Florida, continues to bring artists, dancers and writers into Roswell and Women and Children’s Hospital, picking up accolades as it goes.

And this year, the center is entering new territory: involving itself directly in the creative process by fostering workshops of “The Paul Simon Project,” a new collaboration between MusicalFare Theatre and LehrerDance whose world premiere is slated for next April at the center.

Its coming season has offerings as varied as The Acting Company’s production of Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” in February 2011, Dame Edna in April 2011, its typically illustrious lineup of 10 dance companies (including Savion Glover, Suzanne Farrell Ballet and Parsons Dance) and a reading by author Augusten Burroughs in October.

And all this amid an economic climate that could hardly be less hospitable to arts entrepreneurs.

“We’re dealing with the reality that all arts organizations are dealing with: tighter funding, decline in sponsorships and donations, and ticket sales are down, too,” said David Wedekindt, the center’s marketing director. “I think lesser organizations may have said, we’re going to scale back. We didn’t.We didn’t cut back on anything. We said, we believe in what we’re presenting, the public believes in it. Let’s just keep it up, and we can only believe things are going to improve once we get out of this recession. We feel a very big responsibility.”

From the looks of things, it’s a responsibility the Center for the Arts is living up to.

cdabkowski@buffnews.comnull