In 2005 LIFT founders Lucy Neal and Rose Fenton published a book that reflects the history and philosophy of LIFT and tells the story of the festival’s origins and development. The Turning World included four key chapters on the four pillars of the LIFT manifesto including one on Festival by theatre scholar and cultural analyst Dragan Klaic. As a remembrance to Dragan we have published this chapter below, in its entirety.
LIFT outgrows its festival clothes
By Dragan Klaic
The proliferation of festivals
Since the end of the Cold War there has been a tremendous proliferation of festivals. How many exist in Europe today – 2,000? 3,000? Probably more, but the distinctive features of many of them have become blurred. What a festival programme must present in order to earn artistic approval, the prestige it must acquire, the number of visitors it should attract, the proportion of the budget that can be levied from sponsorship, the number of jobs, reviews, newspaper write-ups and minutes of media coverage it must generate have all become a matter of unrealistic expectation, controversy and quantity-obsessed debate. Nowadays festival proliferation provokes many cynical responses and, indeed, festivals are easy to criticise, even easier to gossip about. Pitted against each other and compared disparagingly with theme parks and the conference and events industry, or unfairly measured against the yardstick of visual arts biennials and film festivals, they face an increasing struggle as their artistic purpose becomes confused with market-driven entertainment.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, festivals such as Bayreuth (1876) and Salzburg (1918) addressed élite audiences and reflected the prestige that they brought with them. In post-Second World War Europe, new festivals of classical music promoted a spirit of reconciliation and reaffirmed traditional humanist values implicit in great art. With the founding of the Avignon and Edinburgh Festivals in 1947, however, a new democratic spirit began to emerge. For theatre director Jean Vilar the Avignon Festival was in essence a try-out of his emancipatory programme to bring high culture to the masses, and, after he had founded the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris, Avignon became a summer extension of his regular season. That was of course long before the tourist industry boom, motorways and high-speed trains. In the not-yet egalitarian Netherlands of the 1950s, the Holland Festival (1948) attracted significant prestige and played to large devoted audiences, but it also brought more innovative foreign work into a rather provincial cultural climate. Early editions of the World Theatre Season in London or of the Automne à Paris similarly provided their own brand of cultural élitism but at the same time sought to establish their democratic credentials in order to justify public subsidy.
In the mid-1960s several international student festivals emerged – Nancy, Erlangen, Wroclaw, Zagreb. Venturing across the Iron Curtain, these were precursors of a new spirit of spontaneous international communication through the performing arts, but it was not until 1968 that there came an explosion of dynamic, irreverent theatrical expression, born out of a newly emerging and politically charged youth culture. During the student demonstrations in Paris and in many other cities across Europe, spontaneous festivals seemed to reshape everyday life. ‘Festivalisation’ was pervasive, inspiring the creation of new companies, festivals, studio theatres and summer schools. After the turmoil of those revolutionary years, the rebellious energy somewhat levelled out, but the élitist pretensions could no longer remain unchallenged and throughout the 70s and 80s a range of new independent festivals, conceived as provocatively ‘alternative’ to the established ones, appeared with clearly contesting agendas. LIFT was born in this new context, alongside, or after, the Festival de Théâtre des Amériques in Montreal, the Åarhus Festuge in Denmark, the Tampere Theatre Festival in Finland, the Zuercher Theater Spektakel in Zurich and Amsterdam’s Festival of Fools.
How did such festivals fit into the wider landscape? In the big European cities a festival was perhaps little more than an extension of the normal cultural programme. In smaller places, however, a festival could provide an extraordinary impulse for creativity, community self-confidence and civic development. In the Cold War period some festivals successfully challenged the ideological divide between the West and the countries beyond the Iron Curtain and sought to display their artistic confluences and contrasts. Since 1989, festivals in former Communist countries, such as the International Theatre Festival in Sibiu, Romania, or the Malta Festival in Poznan, Poland, have become important in overcoming mutual ignorance between East and West, at the same time providing much needed new opportunities for artistic collaboration. During the 1980s specialised contemporary dance festivals made this art form popular all over Western Europe and after 1989 introduced it into Central and Eastern Europe, where it was previously almost unknown.
Something special
Nowadays international performing arts festivals are sometimes criticised for presenting the same fashionable work as each other, although, in fact, some take advantage of co-production in order to share the cost and the risks. Another flippant remark is that festival directors travel to far lands simply so that they can import exotic fare and parade it as a solo scoop. But this, too, is unfair, because while they may appear to hopscotch to lesser known artistic realms in a search of novelty to surprise their constituencies, serious festival organisers seek a sense of distinctiveness and continuity in their overall programming, presenting a range of interdisciplinary works and often crossing boundaries of genre or discipline. In larger cities, where international performing arts works are regularly featured, festivals have to prove that they bring added value and must create events that go well beyond business as usual. The raison d’être of the more ambitious organiser is a flair for producing work that in the course of a normal season would not appear at all. A festival can initiate or facilitate original artistic collaborations that might never emerge from conventional theatre programming or within the mainstream institutions. British theatre director Deborah Warner could develop her unique experimental way of working outside theatre institutions primarily thanks to the support received from LIFT.
The best festivals make connections between different cultures not just as a celebration of ‘diversity’ or ‘multiculturalism’ but as an opportunity for truly daring intercultural engagement. In the 60s and 70s, US experimental groups survived chiefly because of the support of a few European festivals and therefore were able to influence many European theatre-makers. In the mid-60s a few curious festival programmers ‘discovered’ Jerzy Grotowski in the small provincial Polish town of Opole and from there he went on to make a world-wideimpact, chiefly through the festival circuit. More recently, festivals have brought prominent Asian artists, such as Singapore’s Ong Ken Sen, to work in Europe, while festival backing and commitment supported German theatre director Peter Stein and British director Declan Donnellan’s adventurous productions in Moscow.
In areas torn by political strife and protracted conflict, festivals can have a consolidating, healing function, as we can see from the account in this book of the Beirut theatre festivals. Companies that went to the Sarajevo MESS Festival during and after the recent war in former Yugoslavia were clearly demonstrating solidarity with the martyred city and its artistic community. Elsewhere festivals can reinforce the self-confidence of an underprivileged community and celebrate its resourcefulness and new-found sense of purpose – the High Fest International Theatre Festival in Yerevan, for instance, seeks to reduce the cultural isolation of Armenia. Peter Sellars’s agenda for the Adelaide Festival was to return a sense of ownership to the Aboriginal population and to reassert the regional context of Australian arts against the traditional Eurocentrism. International festivals have provided opportunities too for local artists and performance groups to show their work in the different context of the wider international arena, with much more media attention than they would normally receive at home in an ongoing season.
The worst mistake festivals can make is to neglect the artists in their immediate vicinity while reaching out to those in far-flung places. The best festivals succeed in creating new synergies from the dialectic between the local and the global and from the fusion and mutual inspiration of artistic energies from both realms. The success of festival directors is commensurate to their ability to gain the confidence of the more demanding artists, demonstrating a vision which radiates integrity, generosity, artistic discrimination and a readiness to take considerable risks (such attributes may even be set down as a job specification!). In essence, then, festival directors must be cultural superheroes and magicians. But might they not also be Devil’s disciples?
The art of partnership
The root of the word ‘festival’ suggest notions of festivity, feast and celebration. Who celebrates and what is being celebrated remain the key questions. LIFT has always had a firm artistic core and has successfully fused the celebratory aspects inherent in the tradition of festival with artistic experimentation and a vigorous re-mapping of the city topography. This has been achieved in collaboration with a wide range of UK and foreign artists but significantly also through the mobilisation of local people and social agencies, encouraging them to be protagonists and partners rather than just target audiences. Instead of falling from the skies as a parachute detachment, LIFT has involved many constituencies, sometimes widely divergent in socio-economic status, cultural background and artistic affinity, and systematically promoted them to the role of stakeholders. As we can see from the stories in this book, such partners have been cajoled and charmed, but, more importantly, offered a challenge, so that locally grounded projects have in turn served to enrich the overall artistic identity and social significance of the Festival.
Many festivals tend to regard the world of education as just one more niche or marginal target group. LIFT, on the other hand, has established long-term links with school teachers and pupils through its enlightened Education Programme, creating in effect a festive intercultural learning zone. This sort of association could be one of the best arguments for eliciting public support of festivals. Despite conditioning by an overwhelming cultural industry, secondary school pupils become protagonists when offered a chance to shape their own festival project and work alongside professional artists. In return, the Festival’s artistic programme provides the school curriculum with unsurpassed material, a first-hand experience of arts in education, the chance to experiment and the opportunity to address the dialectics of tradition and innovation and the complexities of intercultural fusion. I cannot imagine a better way of recruiting the audiences of tomorrow to replace the rapidly shrinking traditional arts public.
At the other end of the spectrum LIFT has also engaged the corporate sector. All festivals are under pressure to chase sponsors and make them foot the bill for various aspects of the programme. Through its Business Arts Forum LIFT has managed to turn this relationship upside down, recruiting captains of industry to pay the Festival for the privilege of having top-notch artists teach them about intercultural leadership, stress reduction, crisis control, collaborative team building and other features of the managerial core curriculum in a fashion no management course can compete with and no executive MBA programme deliver. Once brought into the artistic kitchen, many ‘corporate clients’ have become admirers and advocates, recruiting other sponsors. But – and this but cannot be stressed enough – such a daring venture requires the involvement of artists who can talk about their work persuasively to constituencies outside the art world. Which drama school, which professional training programme offers such skills? How many artistic leaders can address the leaders of the business community with the vision and persuasiveness of Peter Sellars?
Until a few years ago most festival directors would claim that the prime aim of their festival was artistic expression or experiment. Nowadays, many would put the audience first. Both aims reinforce each other, though there may be tensions between them because if festivals are to pioneer experimental work outside the familiar cannon, they need to nurture appropriate core audiences for such adventurous and fragile activities. When productions from other cultures are presented, they often lose their original artistic and social contexts and need reinterpretation and relocation to gain the understanding of new and different audiences. LIFT’s commissions for specific education and community group work have responded to this prerequisite.
Artistic space/public space
Most performing arts events still take place in structures that originally emerged in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries: the playhouse, the concert hall. For the last hundred years, however, festivals have been a driving force in the re-conceptualisation, expansion and inauguration of new artistic spaces. Whilst Richard Wagner believed he needed to adapt the Bayreuth playhouse to suit his own aesthetic notions, Max Reinhardt launched a more ambitious programme to reclaim central public spaces for artistic events, inspired by illustrious medieval and baroque predecessors – hence the staging of Jedermann in front of Salzburg Cathedral since 1920. Later festivals re-appropriated churches, castles, fortresses and other places of cultural heritage as settings for traditional and contemporary arts events, recreating them as places of collective memory (lieux du memoire).
The next generation of festival leaders challenged the prevailing notions of cultural ‘centre’ and shifted public attention to found sites on the peripheries and margins, to the forgotten, dilapidated combat zones of poverty and post-industrial debris – initiating in this way a major cultural recycling. Revitalisation of written-off urban zones through the arts usually leads to an inevitable gentrification, which pleases urban planners and real-estate developers but ultimately squeezes out the artists; they become victims of their own success when they cannot any longer pay the rents whose sky-rocketing they caused by the success of their artistic endeavour. If today international theatre can be experienced in Hackney or Brixton, in Docklands or King’s Cross, as well as at the Barbican and the South Bank, this is certainly a credit to LIFT and its urban explorations.
Politics of influence
Festivals have the capacity temporarily to alter social conventions and to usher in a tentative utopian programme requiring mutual trust and co-operation. This is a striking counterbalance to the business ethos of competition and marketing which prevails, especially in a city like London, which has a strategic role in contemporary capitalism. In the context of the theatre establishment LIFT has redefined the performing arts as a celebratory activity and this must have had an influence on statutory companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, and even in the West End, although artistic institutions can be tremendously resistant to the alternative stimuli provided by a festival.
So where can LIFT’s impact be discerned? I would argue that the primary beneficiaries are individual professional artists and theatre-makers, whose vision of performance has been transformed by many of LIFT’s productions, whether experienced as spectators or participants. An artist’s memory is his working capital as much as his talent.
My former colleague, Belgrade theatre critic Vladimir Stamenkovi´c argued as long as twenty years ago that international theatre festivals such as BITEF (Beogradski Internacionalni Teatarski Festival) can have a refreshing impact on theatre critics, expanding their ideas of what theatre can be and inspiring them to produce their most vigorous writing. When I myself was a regular critic in Belgrade, I felt that BITEF productions brought out my sharpest analyses and most nuanced responses. But some critics are more narrow-minded when confronted with unfamiliar theatre practices in an international festival programme, their dismissive reviews revealing a low degree of intercultural competence and an arrogant over-confidence that what they know must be the norm, with everything else a futile aberration.
Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal’s narratives in this book record how LIFT has affected the development of many community organisations, offering them artistic challenges and the often unexpected means of pursuing new goals and interests. Bureaucratic officials involved in checking regulations seem to have mellowed in response to LIFT’s enthusiasm, to become seduced or at least sufficiently confused not to cause trouble. School groups have become hooked on experimental theatre and business people, especially those involved in LIFT’s Arts Business Forum, have been beguiled, as is evident in their subsequent advocacy, sponsorship and donor recruitment. Urban planners, real-estate developers and local entrepreneurs have seen their localities transformed and this must have made an impact on the future shape of the city. Indeed, I’d like to see a synoptic map of changes in London over the years, with all the LIFT locations marked and explained ‘before’ and ‘after’. And in terms of cultural policy-making, LIFT has altered the attitudes of the funding agencies, such as the Arts Council, whose officials have been converted from sceptics to supporters – and regular funders – not just of LIFT but of other experimental initiatives inspired by it.
Dizzy from travel
Among festival directors there is no shortage of Reislust – the joy of travel – but routine, fatigue and disappointment with some of the mediocre work seen on the road inevitably take their toll. In the pages of this book I read hardly anything about those frustrations. Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal have been frequent flyers and curious explorers rather than self-indulgent shoppers. And in their reminiscences they skip the unsettling experiences and zoom in, perhaps rather selectively, to the trips that have brought them joy, excitement and revelation. To their credit, they have ventured courageously to many of the most troubled zones of the planet to measure what theatre means for communities in danger and distress, in order to assess the restorative and redemptive powers of performance. But it has taken real imagination and political astuteness to anticipate what those performances might mean when they are shipped to London, how they can be anchored there and how they can make sense.
Festivals presume delicate de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation, a risky and complicated operation. A production is carved out from its natural surroundings, its inherent tradition and its audiences’ expectations, and is made to travel to be hastily imposed on another theatrical, artistic, cultural, linguistic, and socio-political set-up, without time for much in the way of adjustment and try-out. Rehearsals concern technical matters; subtle issues of transition and linkage are taken for granted. If it works it works: if it doesn’t, too bad. Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal have tended to focus on the positive side, on the dream match accomplished. And indeed, they seem to have been often successful in engineering the re-contextualisation of a de-contextualised production – perhaps because of the way they have prepared a nurturing ground for the transplant. Here the multicultural nature of London has provided a major advantage over many other festivals. I am sure, however, that an oral history of the experiences of major European festival directors (a project I would really like to undertake one day) would reveal stories of surprising failures, of unexpected and painful intercultural clashes, misunderstandings and rejections. Such risks are inherent to festival endeavours.
The LIFT spirit stands apart, especially from those festivals that succumb to the drudgery and mechanics of a template hospitality, of conveyor-belt arrangements that enforce on visiting companies a crushing routine of airport-hotel-venue. Theatre-makers who have been doing it for years, a dozen times a year, grow desperate from the numbing fatigue and disorientating sameness of festival circuits, prompting them to reject the platitudes of international cultural exchange, the facile mantras of interculturalism, and yearn for the peace and comfort of their own shabby studio and worn-out sofa.
Beyond a festival formula
There is a clear sense of mission accomplished evident in the writing in this book and it is visible too in the way that long-term observers have witnessed the transformation of LIFT, developed from a traditional festival formula and reinvented as a research, reflection and development facility, now engaged in a systematic, prolonged LIFT Enquiry. LIFT’s radical re-engineering prompts every festival operator to ponder on its longevity and purpose. There are ominous signs of festival fatigue in Europe and yet an urgent need for theatre to re-examine its social foundations and reconsider its capacity to shape the collective imagination and memory, to serve as a vehicle of debate, enhance intercultural relationships and affirm the public space as an essential feature of democracy. By ceasing to be a festival in the traditional sense LIFT has gained in stature in my view, and Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal have completed their festival adventure in a most open and tentative manner that leaves much freedom to their successor to determine LIFT’s future course.
What I draw from this book on a very personal level is a painful sense of how much I have missed from the LIFT programmes. In all those years I was doing my own theatre-related work, travelling a lot, going to theatre frequently, often over a hundred times a year, regularly being disappointed, bored and even angry, but I was not often enough at LIFT and consequently clearly missed some exceptional adventures whose description here makes me curious and jealous. The feelings that LIFT productions have evoked among those fortunate enough to share them – appreciation, awe, envy – have created a sort of emotional capital that belongs to LIFT as much as to London. It remains to be seen how the new LIFT will go on from strength to strength. But its radical reformulation will act as a signpost in the continuing evolution of festivals in the twenty-first century, where they urgently need to assert themselves as zones of creativity and sociability against the proprietary claims of the tourist industry and the representational needs of public authorities and commercial sponsors.
The Turning World by Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal is published by the Caloste Gulbenkian Foundation. Copies can be ordered (£15 including P&P) by emailing info@liftfestival.com
