Critical congress, Serbian style
It’s always healthy to change the scenery of critical discourse, and I spent a rewarding weekend discussing festivals with critics and scholars in Novi Sad, about one hundred kilometres from Belgrade: the audiences, the politics, the funding and the future.
If that sounds a bit dry, I can promise you it wasn’t. We had papers and fulminations from Athens and Turin, Cape Town and Toronto, Bratislava and Dortmund, and Vermont.
Vermont? Well yes, and nothing to do with a White Christmas, either. Nice chap called Bill Reichblum told us that cultural tourism was on the rise over frivolous travel. Apparently, in harder times, people want vacations with bottom, and they may not even be packing the beach wear.
What were termed “high-heeled” festivals are so over; it’s now all about finding new places with new spaces and energising the local community.
But one delegate said that, where he lived in the Ruhr area, there was a big boom in the furniture industry: people were buying nice new sofas so that they didn’t feel too bad about not going out, which costs money (so do the sofas, but I assume they’ve done the math).
To a large extent the history of festivals is linked to the history of the Cold War and the point was made that in a city such as that which Berlin has become, having a festival there doesn’t make much sense.
So festivals were becoming smaller, more localised, and often boiled down to celebrating lifestyle, ecological idealism and social values. Hell, even the leviathan festivals like Edinburgh have greatly increased their “outreach” and educational work (not necessarily out of altruism; there’s limitless money in box-ticking accessibility strategies); Edinburgh this year has a summer school for arts education, and the twelve satellite festivals — although the fringe, of course, is a bit more than that — include a spirituality and peace festival, and one for ethnic minorities.
Our conference on festival narcisssism and audience development was a small step on the way to redressing an imbalance, as described by my brilliant friend Dragan Klaic, the Serbian theatre professor based in Amsterdam, between the proliferation of festivals and the non-proliferation of research on the subject.
Dragan himself is heading up the research, which is gathering pace at Leeds Metropolitan University and is likely to provide some very interesting cultural and sociological information in a few years’ time.
Meanwhile, we exchanged our stories and experiences at this symposium under the umbrella of the fifty-fourth Sterijino Pozorje festival. And we had time to visit the festival itself, as well as discuss theatre informally across the world, which makes a nice change from chatting about who’s taking over in Calendar Girls or does Tim Walker know what he’s talking about.
Our solidarity and seriousness could not survive, however, more than an hour of so of a show called The Communist Manifesto from Stockholm, an excruciatingly dull mechanised production based on the less than scintillating word play of Marx and Engels.
We fared much better at a striking new Serbian play, The Doll Ship by Milena Markovic, who combines qualities of Caryl Churchill and Bryony Lavery with added magic realism, and an outdoor King Lear in the Petrovaradin Fortress across the river.
The Lear was the great Croatian actor Rade Serbedzija, and the music was by none other than the British composer Nigel Osborne. It was a shame that Goneril looked more like Lear’s auntie than his daughter, but there was striking use of the castle’s exciting medieval locations as seven hundred of us pushed our way around the place.
The conference wallahs had been issued with blankets, which marked us out as a small clique of nomadic blanket people, no doubt rushing back to our computers to give the production, and the festivals debate, a certain amount of blanket coverage.