Last year, Neil Butler’s company UZ Events took over the running of the Bradford International Festival – and came under fire from the previous festival organisers. Prior to the opening of the 2003 festival this Thursday, Butler talks to Arts Hub about why he just wants to get on with his job, and his vision for the future of the festival.
‘I’ve never been exposed to that kind of thing before,’ says Butler, commenting on the vitriolic backlash over the running of last year’s festival. ‘We [UZ Events] just went through a tendering process, and got the job,’ he explains, matter-of-fact.
In 2002, the Bradford Council contracted a new management team to run the Bradford International Festival, which operated as the Bradford Festival from 1987 to 2001. The new line-up included Producer Robin Morley and Director Neil Butler, who are both directors of the Scotland-based UZ Events, an organisation working nationally and internationally to create strategic, cultural events.
After last year’s festival, a Scrutiny Committee, which included the former festival organisers, criticised the performance of the Council and the newly-established Bradford International Festival Ltd. At the crux of the discontent was the perceived abandonment of the Bradford community, which was upheld as the heart of the festival.
In a (long and vehemenent) document scrutinising the council and new festival management, Scrutiny Committee members stated: ‘The local authority has failed to understand the resonance of the festival for the community of Bradford.’
But it’s a viewpoint that Butler strongly disagrees with.
‘It’s not our festival, it belongs to Bradford…and our job is to support the event and make the festival happen,’ he emphasises.
The criticism certainly didn’t help at the time, Butler says, adding ‘I was just trying to get on with my job.’
Rather than dwell on past events, though, Butler is keen to get on with the business of running this year’s festival and developing partnerships to drive the annual event forward.
The 2003 festival, tagged Be There 2003, focuses on an overriding theme of, as Butler quips, ‘luuurve’.
‘When we were putting together the festival, it was at a time when there was quite a lot of conflict in the world,’ he says. It was this tension which inspired the idea to base the main carnival parade around ‘Love’. The parade, designed by Improbable Theatre’s Graeme Gilmour, features large-scale puppets including gods and goddesses of love, Eros and Venus.
Apart from the parade, which involves about 1000 local members of the community, according to Butler, another main feature is the Mela, described as the biggest celebration of Asian culture in Europe.
Last year’s Mela attracted around 120,000 people, and organisers expect large crowds to descend on the 2003 event, with top names including Apache Indian, the Mighty Zulu Nation, Pakistani rock-pop group Junoon, and Malkit Singh, dubbed the biggest selling Bhangra artist ever.
The Mela is part of the festival’s emphasis on free outdoor events, which last year brought Improbable Theatre’s spectacular Sticky show to Bradford. The combination of large-scale outdoor theatre and pyrotechnics returns in this year’s programme with IOU’s newly-commissioned Tattoo, as well as a theatrical fireworks show by External Combustion and another by The World Famous.
Meanwhile, Butler points to a premiere by Bradford born and bred company mind the…gap as another festival highlight. One of the UK’s leading theatre companies working with learning disabled artists, the new production of The Emperor’s New Clothes kicks off the first weekend of the festival this Friday.
Butler is full of praise for mind the…gap, a company whose work he describes as ‘incredibly high quality.’
‘There are few theatre companies who are dealing with people with special needs and they [mind the…gap] do very inspirational work,’ he notes.
Butler is also looking forward to future festivals, hinting that plans are already well underway to take the event in new directions. While an announcement on this will emerge during the next week, Butler commented: ‘I think what we can say [is] that the directional change for the festival is about going into long-lasting relationships with producers and artists across Europe and further afield,’ he says.
It’s a direction Butler can feel fairly confident in driving forward. About to celebrate his 50th birthday, Butler’s career has spanned a variety of roles requiring him to develop international relationships, including a key part in developing the International Festivals and Events programme for Glasgow, as part of its European City of Culture celebrations in 1990.
In 1994 he established UZ, which is responsible for the Glasgow Art Fair and recently established International Music Convention, MusicWorks.
And on December 31, 1999, a conceptual art project devised by Butler saw a 150-foot drawing fed from one fax machine to another, involving artists and events teams from the UK to Johannesburg, Delhi, Sydney, New York, Porta, which ended up feeding back to Butler’s second fax in Glasgow. The Wrap the World (www.wraptheworld.com) project was televised worldwide by the BBC to 1.4 billion people.
But when it comes to Bradford’s International Festival, Butler hopes this year’s event will build on the company’s first production in 2002. ‘The first year, we only had a relatively short period of time, we literally only had a few months [to pull the programme together]’ he admits. ‘This year we’ve had a whole year to work on it. So we’ve been able to involve a very wide community in organising and running the festival,’ Butler says.
‘…and I hope with community support we will continue to develop it for years to come.’
I guess the results will speak for themselves. You’ll just have to Be There.
‘Be There 2003: The Bradford International Festival’ runs from June 12 to 22. For further information and programme details visit www.bethere2003.com
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