Image: Bayala: Out of the Vaults, Sydney Festival 2017
Festivals are often touted for their ability to transform a city, bringing in tourists, stimulation economic activity, championing new art forms and building new audiences.
But as the number of festivals mushrooms, the tendency to stick the label ‘festival’ on everything from a summer in-house program to a massive international gathering has made the term amorphous, perhaps even meaningless.
A recent panel at the Sydney Opera House Culture Club asked the question What are festivals for?
For intensity
Festivals are defined by intensity, the drawing together of content in close geographical or temporal proximity. That crucible of activity makes them cultural accelerators, said Sydney Festival Director Wesley Enoch.
‘By seeing a concentration of work in a particular area of interest – seven dance shows in three weeks rather than seven dance shows over a year for example – you can create in your own mind a number of touch points.’
For those who are daunted by this number – Enoch has news. His record stands a 42 shows in ten days.
The intensity of delivery feeds into a new audience demand for events and entertainment. Fergus Linehan, CEO and Director of Edinburgh International Festival, sees that demand expressed in the way festivals create rituals and become an audience habit. ‘It is amazing how quickly VIVID Sydney took hold as a festival, and if you put fireworks in it, you have got it for life,’ he said.
Such intensity has pros and cons for those who work in the festival sector. Linehan said that running a theatre is something like a marriage, but running festivals is like having a summer fling all the time – there’s a sense of promiscuity with the work. ‘Sometimes you wish you were just working on the one thing and there is always this sense that you are rushing off to the next best thing.’
The need for concentrated energy means walkable cities are often said to make the best festivals.’ It is no coincidence that New York, Paris and Tokyo don’t have major festivals because they are too difficult to transform. There is a certain model that says the mid-sized city is the best to place a festival,’ said Linehan.
Rachel Healy, Co-Artistic Director of Adelaide Festival sees the advantage of working in a smaller city. ‘You can see a show at 2 pm and run across the road and see another at 5, and then a free event at 8. The problem with bigger cities is that you loose time getting across town.’
For community
Healy said that the boom in ideas festivals, such as the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, have become like ‘the new church’.
‘Any of us can go home tonight and download and listen to talk of Richard Dawkins in bed, but people want to get together with each other and hear him talk live – the desire to be in the room with really smart people.
‘It is what festivals have always done – provide people with meaning in their lives – and artists have a particular take on that,’ she added.
There is a danger that this kind of festivalisation reinforces our prejudices, a zeitgeist demonstrated in the recent American elections.
‘We often live in our own echo chambers. I am worried that the festivalisation is responding to that tribalisation – here is a whole group of people who agree with each other, so we will create a festival around that to get them engaged,’ he said.
Linehan was more optimistic, noting that there has always been and ebb and flow around festivals. ‘Almost every major rock and roll festival in Australia has died in the last few years, and are struggling the world over. There is something generational about it.’
For support
Apart from delivering different audiences experiences, festivals also enable arts events to access support more effectively.
The power of the word ‘festival’ to attract audiences has led to a competitive rise in organisation-based festivals, such as All About Women and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Sydney Opera House, or Meltdown at the Southbank Centre in London.
Healy, who experienced this trend when she worked at Sydney Opera House and City of Sydney, said when organisations ‘put together a lot of individual programs and call it a festival’ they get media, marketing and sponsor support that could not be otherwise accessed.
‘As soon as you call it a festival you get a whole range of other benefits, and government was quick to see that as a tourism enabler – it could generate employment, contribute to social outcomes, and suddenly you have events departments setting up to create major events in-house,’ she said.
For society
Big brand festivals function as a vanguard for pushing city governments forward and enabling more cultural activity, said Healy.
Enoch agreed: ‘There is a responsibility of the larger festivals to be the pointy end of the spear; to be prototyping shifts and changes, and once it has happened once, it is easier for it to happen again and for others to fall behind it.’
An example is working with councils to provide the necessary flexibility to allow shows to occur in off-beat venues.
Lineham noted that the vigorous health and safety culture combined with the cost of real estate in Australian cities made it difficult to activate spaces. ‘Where every square inch is worth a fortune you don’t tend to have those little spaces you have that the world over.’
Healy believes that Edinburgh International Festival – for this very reason – is a really important model for Sydney.
‘It has something like 2,500 shows per day, but not 2,500 theatres or halls.The process of achieving that in Sydney would be six months minimum but Edinburgh Council have a system where they triage the relevant people – their OH&S guy, fire wardens – so that you can arrive from anywhere in the world two weeks before and get a public entertainment licence to perform. They see their role as enabling cultural activity to happen in spaces not custom build for that purpose.
‘Most people don’t have endless budgets and months to put on a show in a hairdresser for 40 people – that’s kind of thing of thing that transforms a city and engages its people city wide. We still have a long way to go, and Sydney needs to look at exemplars like Edinburgh.’
For access
All the festival directors acknowledge the tension between providing access and raising revenue, and noted different festivals resolve the issue differently.
The average ticket buyer at the Sydney Festival buys three or four tickets, in Melbourne and Adelaide it is seven or eight but Sydney Festival offers more free activities.
Enoch played the provocateur on the panel asking whether that vital revenue spinner – tickets – could be done away with.
‘In a perfect world would we make everything free? Is there a world where festivals should be totally accessible?’ he asked.
‘You want as many people to engage in the work but if you charge ticket prices then you can get do more with that gathered income. This whole idea of philanthropy has been this great goal in Australia over the last ten years, to get more donors along to grow that pie and to be able to put more on. There is a growing feeling that the contribution of individual is not just to buy a ticket, but to help others in the city and support the broader thinking of what you want your city to be.’
Equity is also an issue when it comes to programming. Healy says she uses a spread sheet to ‘pressure test her own biases’.
‘I am conscious that most programs have a white male privileged embedded in them and it is a really challenging question. You never feel like you nailed it,’ she said. ‘Commissioning new work is one area that a festival director can intervene and shape those future conversations.’
For too much at once
Linehan said with all these conflicting aims, it was essential that festivals were aware of their goals and the potential conflicts between them.
‘You have to define success, and define what you are doing, and then explain it to people. Some festivals are not about attracting large numbers – they are just about dealing with an art form and can be incredibly successful. But if you get a lot of public money, there is a very politic reality you have to deal with – somebody will be looking at tourist numbers, somebody looking at social impact, somebody at art form development – the bigger the festival tends to get the more you the stakeholder needs grow.’
What are festivals for? was part of the Culture Club program presented by the Sydney Opera House.
