It’s the first day of the last month of spring, and summer is definitely in the air in Melbourne, much to the delight of visiting Brit Debra King. The co-Creative Producer of Cultureshock, the arts festival leading up to this year’s Commonwealth Games in Manchester, is in Australia to discuss the event with the organisers of Melbourne’s cultural programme for 2006.
King’s visit has neatly coincided with the Melbourne Festival. Although there are many comparisons to be made when it comes to international festival programming, the first question I ask is what King thinks of Melbourne’s coffee, as I eagerly slurp mine down after years of caffeine deprivation in London, the world’s Capital of Bad Coffee Culture.
King happily agrees the coffee is far superior to Ol’ Blighty’s, but she is equally impressed with Melbourne’s artistic integrity, which she believes, is ahead of Manchester.
‘I think the Melbourne Festival programme is really diverse, it looks at cultural difference and has real artistic integrity,’ King says.
‘I think Melbourne has really sold itself on its multicultural image. This is the first time I have been here, but that’s the sense I got, that it’s quite a priority and Manchester is just getting to that point now,’ King realises, adding: ‘It seems to be a real festival city!’
Cultural diversity was one of the talking points between King and organisers of Melbourne’s arts festival for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. King reflects that Cultureshock was about moving away from empirical notions and towards new ideas of the Commonwealth.
‘It was very much about a contemporary Commonwealth and what the Commonwealth means to people now, about peoples’ identity and perceptions, what it’s like to move from one country to another, about culture and awareness,’ King says. ‘And I think with everything that’s going on in the world at the moment, it rang very true,’ she adds.
Running for almost four months, from March 11 to July 24, Cultureshock showcased about 200 events across the arts spectrum and also included a film and literature festival.
King and her Cultureshock co-Creative Producer, Tanja Farman, are now in the process of pulling together an evaluation of the festival, thinking about establishing their own company to promote international art events, as well as researching a feasibility study on the prospect of a regular international festival in the North West region.
‘It’s very exciting for our region because there isn’t one at the moment,’ King says, adding the Regional Development Agency, one of the main Cultureshock funders, are particulary interested in profiling the region through such a festival after the success of this year’s event.
‘The Regional Development Agency for the North West region can see the benefit of profiling the region through international arts in a way that perhaps they hadn’t seen before,’ King observes.
‘I think the fact that arts was used to profile Manchester as a city has really excited them and they want to see how that can be developed and taken further, so that’s a really good legacy [of Cultureshock].’
‘The huge benefit was being linked to an international sporting event,’ King reckons.
It may seem like a surprising outcome. Typically, the arenas of sport and art are often quite polarised – and audiences just as much so. But the Cultureshock experience suggests there is in fact crossover between the two, especially at an international sporting event where cultural diversity is largely represented, something the arts is keen to reflect.
‘Through research we have done so far, 50 per cent of attendants at arts events were also booking to go to sports events. So in terms of cross over in audiences, that’s quite a good percentage,’ says King.
‘In terms of the artwork I think the main connections were through visual arts and photography,’ she explains, adding that the energy and immediacy of sport seems to link in with how audiences view visual art, while the physicality of dance and sport was another connection.
One regret King has, which will form part of the evaluation and has also influenced the feasibility study, is that there was little time to commission work for the festival. Herself and Farman experienced somewhat of a culture shock when they were appointed Creative Producers in April 2001, giving them less than a year to programme a four-month international festival, while waiting on funding which did not arrive in full until October that year.
‘With the feasability study, we’ve said time is an absolutely essential factor and that’s where Melbourne is ahead, because they are starting to think about it now. If they want to commission new work, they have the time to do it.’
