CAL/Meanjin essay: Is the Carnival Over?

In March 2009 I produced a show at the Adelaide Fringe’s Garden of Unearthly Delights. Entitled The Colors Interactive Comeback Show, it was an odd but sometimes hilarious mixture of music, cabaret and art prank, created by Sydney musician Alon Ilsar and Melbourne writer/director Erick Mitsak. Like most shows in fringe festivals, it sold poorly. On the other hand, it may well have been one of the most enjoyable things I have ever done. To understand why, you need to know a little more about this strange event. Better yet, it would help if you have experienced it.

For more than a month in the often perfect weather of an Adelaide autumn, the Garden of Unearthly Delights is open six nights a week to all comers. There is no entry fee; instead, patrons enter for free through a decorated arch to find an enchanted pleasure garden of ticketed side-shows, amusements, small theatres, circus tents, food stalls, bars, roving buskers and performers and, of course, the obligatory Spiegel tent. All told, the program listed eighty-seven shows for 2009, many of which sold out, and some of which generated extraordinary interest for relatively unknown performers, such as the mysterious Boy with Tape on His Face, or the rather more straight-forward but equally enjoyable Circus Trick Tease. While it is not quite Burning Man, to describe it as ‘carnivalesque’ understates its wild revelry; on certain evenings ‘Bakhtinian’ might be a better description for its excess.

The development and staging of Circus Trick Tease is a good example of how a company and a festival interact. According to Malia Walsh, one of Circus Trick Tease’s principals, ‘someone from Strut & Fret [the Garden of Unearthly Delights’ organisers] had seen our show and thought it would work beautifully in the Garden’. After a meeting, they were offered a four-week show.

As arts companies often do, Circus Trick Tease formed in a bar. The diminutive Walsh met strong-man Shannon McGurgan and ‘he picked me up and played catch with me’. Walsh’s background was in ballet, but she found she enjoyed the different artistic vista of circus. ‘We all come from vastly different backgrounds: Shannon was a nurse to start with, and Farhad, being from Iran, was into trad circus.’

Despite their success, Circus Trick Tease struggled to make a dollar. ‘Doing a Fringe show doesn’t help the bank balance in any way, shape or form,’ Walsh remarks ruefully. But the social and artistic aspects help make up for this.

‘Not only did we do our shows over there, we got countless other shows out of being there—by the end of the festival I had done forty-eight shows altogether: we did a corporate thing, we did cabaret spots, we did spots for Bank SA.’

If Circus Trick Tease is in many ways typical of a Fringe show, the Garden of Unearthly Delights has much in common with other parts of the surprisingly small and insular Australian festivals scene. It’s a small industry with an in-group feel. The Garden shares much of its staff, infrastructure and indeed content with a circuit of similar festivals; staff often move from festival to festival and the same faces pop up at different events.

Will Todd is one of those itinerant workers. The production manager for the Garden of Unearthly Delights, he can also be found working behind the scenes at many other arts festivals around the country. ‘In the last twelve months I’ve worked on the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the Comedy Festival, Adelaide Fringe and the Garden of Unearthly Delights, Melbourne Writers Festival, I’ve worked for Circus Oz and Melbourne Fringe,’ he told me. ‘So you just jump between them and try to balance.’ Todd loves the variety. ‘I’ve tried doing nine to five jobs, at the same job, and I go spare.’

The scale of the production task involved in setting up something like the Garden is impressive—similar to a medium-sized outdoor rock festival in size, but running for five weeks instead of a single day. ‘A production manager is the person who takes people’s ideas and makes the logistics of it happen. In some ways it takes beautiful, fanciful ideas and destroys dreams,’ he quips, before adding that his role is to take those ideas and find ‘a practical way of doing it that fits the budget or criteria that you have to work with. ‘There’s obviously the technical side—sound, lights and that sort of thing—and there’s a lot of different people who have to be dealt with. Hopefully if everything goes well nobody knows you exist.’

Although the Garden of Unearthly Delights is one of the best-attended parts of the Adelaide Fringe, the broader festival is larger still. As the Adelaide Fringe’s Artistic Director Christie Anthoney explains, when measured by the sheer number of artists and acts performing, it’s the largest festival in Australia. ‘Your average festival has about thirty to fifty shows, usually hand selected by a director. At the Fringe this year we have 530 shows … we sold about a quarter of a million tickets.’

There’s a lot of risk. The average audience for a session at Adelaide Fringe hovers just above double figures. As Anthoney told me, ‘The Fringe is used as a platform for the presentation of work, and that means predominantly for new work, for premieres and unearthing new artists who haven’t actually given it a go before, or for professionals, people who have been doing it for years, who run in new work and take their own risks before someone will pick it up and take the risk for them.’

Why do artists do it? And why do people come? For come they do: many shows at Adelaide Fringe sell out their entire season, and many more quickly build good audiences after strong early shows.

The reasons they do it: firstly, Adelaide is still a fantastic festival city because of its size … it’s a city where you just can’t miss it and you feel like you’re in a like-minded group of people. I’ll probably regret saying this but there’s almost a gathering kind of pilgrimage aspect of making the journey to Adelaide during the fringe, and that’s important, it’s still got that vibe to it.

The second reason is audiences. Adelaide has a reputation for hungry audiences … they pay money to go and see fresh stuff.

Thirdly, it’s this thing about promoters and artists getting picked up for other shows … we’ve had several shows go straight from Adelaide Fringe into the Sydney Festival or Perth Festival.

Anthoney has started a program called Honeypot, which brings festival directors and venue bookers to Adelaide to see and hopefully buy shows.

What is it that makes festivals such a compelling proposition for audiences? And how did we end up with an expensive and publicly funded arts festival in every state capital of Australia? I spent a couple of months interviewing many of the best-known artistic directors in the Australian festivals scene, trying to find out. What I discovered was not just a remarkable diversity of views, but an almost instinctive belief in the human love of assembly, and the power of festivals as platforms for presenting culture.

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Those seeking a historical perspective for the arts festival usually look back to classical antiquity. But in truth, the modern arts festival has almost nothing in common with the festivals of the Athenians. The Dionysian aspect of modern events is most obvious at outdoor music events such as Parklife or Splendour in the Grass, and the transcendent experience is generally supplied not by religious ritual but by liberal doses of the party drug ecstasy. The competitive nature of the Athenian festivals, where citizens voted on the best performances, is seldom found in our time in capital ‘A’ arts festivals; that role has been usurped by televised talent shows such as Australian Idol and So You Think You Can Dance.

In more concrete terms, the modern history of Australian festivals begins with the Perth and Adelaide festivals, which were established in the 1950s on the template of the Edinburgh Festival. Edinburgh was a postwar creation, established by Rudolf Bing and Henry Harvey Wood with the goal of providing ‘a platform for the flowering of the human spirit’—a remarkably optimistic undertaking in a country still recovering from a scarifying war. At a time when ration cards were still a feature of everyday life, the ‘flowering of the human spirit’ may not have represented an achievable goal in Scotland, but it was certainly a desirable one.

As former Adelaide Festival director Anthony Steel points out, all the Australian capital city arts festivals are based on the Edinburgh pattern. ‘Certainly Adelaide was a direct copy of Edinburgh, and most of the festivals that have started in capital cities in Australia since have been direct copies of Adelaide. The politicians want to keep up with the Joneses and “if Adelaide has one, then we should certainly have one” has been the attitude.’

While Perth is older, it was Adelaide that established itself as the premier event in the antipodes for serious arts lovers. Beginning in 1960, the Adelaide Festival was for some decades the only event where local audiences could see the kind of famous, high-brow artists and companies that are these days slightly jarringly referred to as ‘world class’. It was Adelaide, particularly in its glory years under Steel’s directorship, that brought to Australian shores artists of the calibre of James Baldwin, Stephen Spender, Kurt Vonnegut, Merce Cunningham (the first time around), Wole Soyinka, Allan Ginsberg, Michael Tippett, Rudolf Nureyev and Benjamin Britten.

Despite being described by current directors such as Brett Sheehy as an inspirational mentor, Steel is characteristically modest about his achievements. ‘In my early days in Adelaide, I would call it a pro-am affair,’ he told me, with impeccable diction and no little panache, in a phone interview from his house in Adelaide. ‘It really wasn’t much at all, and Adelaide was the only thing in the country that counted. So as director of the Adelaide Festival in those days, it was quite easy. If you knew anything at all about the arts outside Australia, it was quite easy to astonish people.’

A glance at Steel’s 1974 program gives us a glimpse of how refreshing and truly risky those earlier Adelaide Festivals must have seemed. Featuring recitals by Andre Tchaikowski (whose skull is still acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company) and concerts by the Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra, it culminated in a reading of Ogden Nash’s poetry by Premier Don Dunstan, set to Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals and held at the Adelaide Zoo. History records that the performance sold out.

The decades since South Australia came of age as the ‘festival state’ have seen considerable growth in the number and size of festivals of all types, including arts festivals. The marketing company 7th Dimension lists no fewer than 281 festivals in Australia in the 2009 calendar year, ranging from the Big Day Out to the Yackandandah Folk Festival. Industry body Live Performance Australia estimates that festivals generated $88 million in ticket sales in 2008, and played to audiences of 1.77 million—probably an underestimate, as the survey didn’t include the growing number of festivals that self-ticket their event.

In part this has been driven by cultural economics. The rise of digital media, especially the MP3, has transformed the business models of cultural industries such as music. Suddenly, festivals with high fences and security guards seemed a far safer business proposition than releasing CDs that would inevitably be ripped, burned and file-shared on websites such as The Pirate Bay. As former Sydney Festival director Fergus Lineham explained:

The whole breakdown of music distribution changed a lot of things. A lot of people could be a lot more adventurous because getting onto the label didn’t matter as much. Because of the collapse of revenue from the sale of albums, everybody started touring like crazy. Everyone was on tour all the time, and available in a way that they just weren’t before. Which in turn meant that people’s live shows became much more important, so you take an artist like Joanna Newsome, her live show is infinitely better than her albums.

Demographics also helped. Australia’s long boom between 1992 and 2008 drove strong growth in disposable incomes for twenty- and thirty-somethings, money that they gladly parted with in return for evanescent cultural experiences. Lineham told me that when the Sydney Festival researched its audience’s income levels at its festival club, the Becks Bar, ‘I was amazed at the [number who] were earning over $100,000. They were all kind of “cool kids”, if you know what I mean. There were a lot of people in Sydney and elsewhere who had no difficulty dropping $200, $300 on a weekend or a night out.’

Lineham also points to the trend among younger audiences towards something he calls the ‘mini-break’. ‘I also have another theory: that this thing came out of the second generation of club culture,’ he explained. ‘They’re a very experiential crowd and they don’t really care what it is, it could be theatre, it could be whatever, but they want these experiences and therefore they go off to the full moon party in Goa, they go off on these mini-breaks all the time.’ Lineham points to the rise of ‘mini-breaks’, particularly in Europe. ‘You know, people going to Barcelona for the weekend, the sense is that people wanted these exotic, quite intense short experiences—it’s almost like the urban holiday.’

But trends in public policy have also played their part. In the 1980s, for instance, industrial development was generally considered to be driven by large-scale corporate R&D programs. The favoured model of technocrats and academic popularisers was the Japanese economic miracle, thought to be the result of a tight policy partnership between Japan’s hi-tech consumer manufacturers and the legendary Ministry for International Trade and Industry. In contrast, the notion of ‘human capital’ used to be thought of as mainly a matter for a nations’ schools and universities. Culture was a thing to be preserved, rather than an important sector of the economy deserving its own industry policy.

By the late 1990s, academic fashion had swung around to a greater recognition of the importance of culture to the economy, driven in part by the tech boom and the millenarian cultural ferment it unleashed. Simultaneously, a new school of cultural economists began to articulate ideas and policy prescriptions about the so-called ‘creative industries’, arguing that cultural investment could drive significant economic benefits for cities and regions.

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that one man in particular transformed the way city councils and governments thought about culture. With the publication of The Rise of the Creative Classes, Carnegie Mellon economist Richard Florida offered a brilliantly argued and seductively simple theory about the importance of arts and culture to regional economies. There wasn’t too much more to his argument than what the subtitle of his book—‘Why cities without gays and rock-stars are losing the economic race’—contended. Florida’s thesis was light on data and riddled with inconsistencies. But the argument that cultural investment would bring young, talented and creative people flocking to a municipality had a kind of compelling logic that mayors and arts ministers found irresistible. With Edinburgh’s festival and Bilbao’s art gallery as their most conspicuous models, governments found new money for many big-city arts festivals under the rubric of ‘cultural tourism’.

A festival cluster the size of Adelaide’s can reap big rewards for a city. According to Anthoney, the Adelaide Fringe’s economic impact is in the order of $27 million, ‘which means money that was generated and spent in South Australia that may not have been if was not for the Fringe’. Considering the South Australian Government spends around $1 million sponsoring the Fringe, the return on investment in purely economic terms is impressive. ‘It’s funny, everyone knows the reason we have a Fringe is not to generate money for the state,’ Anthoney laughs, ‘but numbers are the only measurable tool.’ The Adelaide Fringe is currently working with the University of South Australia and Griffith University on a new study measuring the benefit of the festival to participating artists.

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The new resources flowing to the sector combined with the existing structure of artistic directorships to create a new model for Australian arts organisations: the superstar director. In many ways the artistic director of a major capital city arts festival is one of the last bastions of true patronage in the arts. With commissioning and programming resources unparalleled in the broader Australian cultural sector, artistic directors have the discretion, mandate and ambit to dictate artistic outcomes across an entire city. Although artistic directors don’t tend to last much longer than three or four years, while they hold their position their judgement is seldom challenged. They are in many ways the last Renaissance princes of the art world. No wonder Melbourne Festival director Brett Sheehy calls it ‘the best job in the world’.

Sheehy should know. Artistic directors tend to rotate around the major arts festivals, and Sheehy has now directed three of the biggest: Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne. He is a high-energy person who seems to genuinely love the role. ‘I do think a festival is an absolute marriage between the taste, personality and style of the director and the taste, personality and style of the city. I think it’s naive of us to start saying “this is what the festival is”, because they’re so driven by who the director is.’

In my interviews with Australian festival directors, I discovered a spectrum of programming philosophies. For some, like Edmunds, the curatorial process is a highly researched and aesthetically rigorous process that demands intense and serious critical engagement. ‘I approach [programming] from a curatorial point of view,’ she explained, ‘and that point of view is not that I’m producing an outcome, but [asking] what is it that you’re there to protect, unpack, examine, explore and facilitate an audience for.’

‘I’m very interested in saying here’s work that I think is extremely valid, resonant, matters immensely, history may or may not yet recognise it, but there’s something that it’s doing in its form, practice or visionary intention that is worth our interrogation and our exploration—so how do I facilitate that.’

An opposing view of festival programming is that the director should simply program what he or she likes. It was best put by Anthony Steel, who told me (with what I suspect to be characteristic charm) an anecdote to explain the position.

There was a wonderful cultural commentator in Britain called Bernard Levin, who is now sadly no longer with us. He wrote marvellous books but he also wrote regular columns in the Times which were very often hysterically funny, because he was rude about everybody. At one of the Adelaide Festivals, not mine, it was Christopher Hunt’s, I was speaking on a panel with Bernard and Christopher about the role of the festival director. And when it came to the dreaded question time, someone addressed this question to Levin: when somebody is programming a festival like the Adelaide Festival, should he (and it was in those days it inevitably was a he) try to please a lot of people, or should he concentrate on what he considers to be interesting work?

Bernard Levin’s reply, and I always thought that this was a very good summing up of the attitude a festival director should take in programming, was: ‘The director of a festival should be trying to please no-one but himself.’ And I think that’s spot on.

As Steel points out: ‘If people don’t like it or the board is grumpy, they can always fire the festival director. I think it’s always the job of the festival director to implant his or her stamp on the program, and just sock it to them.’

The current director of the Adelaide Festival, Paul Grabowsky, programs in the same vein. ‘At the end of the day, it’s what I like … being a performing artist myself, I’m less inclined to have my boat floated by ideas-driven or theory-driven work than by something which grabs me viscerally.

If Steel and Edmunds sit at each end of the spectrum, directors such as Sheehy and Lindy Hume are somewhere in between. Hume directed for four years at Perth before getting the Sydney Festival job in the wake of Fergus Lineham. She cites her experience as an opera director to argue that ‘the question for me is, what is the story we’re telling here? and try to be very clear about that story. In the case of Perth, the story I was trying to tell was more to do with a broad celebration of the human condition, what it is to be human, the extraordinary range. In terms of what we want to do with Sydney, it’s more a story of what sort of city is this. We have this amazing position statement which, I inherited from Fergus but which I have no intention of changing—I love it—which is ‘This is our city in summer’, which asks a lot more questions than you actually think it does.’

Sheehy looks for aesthetic innovation and truth in performance. ‘I personally look for artists who are making waves, rather than riding them, any spark of complete originality in the work, any time I have an experience. I look for truth all the time, especially in performance … [I have a] craving for that truthful moment on stage and believing—no matter how fantastical the narrative—believing in that moment.’

Ultimately, of course, festival directors have to put together a program within a budget and that people will want to go and see. It can be very difficult to get the balance right. As Sheehy explained: ‘My shortlist for this festival was about 470, 480 separate things, and by a “short list” I mean every single one of them I would have been incredibly proud to have my name associated with the presentation of that work in Australia. That had to shake down to, I think, seventy-eight events in the program.’

The international arts festival scene is a circuit, but it is also a marketplace. Most Australian directors go to Europe to festivals such as Edinburgh and Avignon to see what is hot this year. ‘A lot of festivals are like cultural shopping malls,’ Grabowsky contends. ‘It’s almost as though the director has gone with a cheque book and said, “I’ll have one of those, one of those, one of those.” ’ And as with any marketplace, some products are hotter than others. Hume reports that the ‘big, buzzy show’ last year in Avignon was Romeo Castelluci’s Inferno. ‘You see them start in those sorts of festivals and then they do the circuit.’

Why is this? Lineham believes it is because contemporary arts audiences actually demand a certain palette of work:

One of the big changes I’ve thought has happened [relates to] this argument that somebody who lives in the centre of London has more in common with someone who lives in the centre of Tokyo than someone who lives in Woking or Bournemouth. Urban life has a particular kind of cultural references, and what people want to see is Phillip Glass and Pina Bausch.

It’s this sort of shared mega-city sensibility. If people are going to go and live somewhere, if they don’t see these major things coming through, they feel kind of cut off from it and they don’t like that. And when you go to your successful urban professional, what they want is this kind of ‘global eclecticism’, that’s what they aspire to.

And there’s always the stakeholders to keep happy. In arts-speak, funding bodies and governments are generally known by the euphemism ‘stakeholders’. As Kristy Edmunds found in Melbourne, while the term seems innocuous, the reality is often very different. ‘We don’t have that term actually in the States, and not actually in Europe either,’ she told me. ‘If you just think about it as a word, it could be anyone who has a stake in the experience of this festival, so I was like “I love that the Australians think in this way about the festival” and that was my naive first assumption,’ she laughed. ‘And so then I realised what they meant was that “stakeholders” predominantly means the government funding institutions.’

Anthony Steel points out that: ‘Increasingly over the years, government and sponsors want big houses. They’re not interested in programming and sadly often nowadays when they’re choosing the festival director, the people who are interviewing know nothing about festival programming and probably couldn’t care less either.’ The result is that boards ‘are far more inclined to look for the candidate’s abilities at raising sponsorship and marketing.’

When it comes to stakeholders, the untimely demise of Peter Sellars, who fell out with his board and resigned before directing his first Adelaide Festival, is generally held to be a cautionary tale. As current Adelaide Festival director Paul Grabowsky (who was lured from the job at the Queensland Music Festival, in part because of inferior funding there) remarked, ‘Peter Sellars tried to run his festival a certain way, and it didn’t work structurally to run it that way. I guess the mistake was in attempting to build a layer of middle management that really thinned the budget considerably just in wages alone.’ Grabowksy is of the older school. Like Anthony Steel and Leo Schofield, he believes that ‘an artistic director should be able to call the program, that’s really what their job is’.

One of the problems posed by stakeholders is that, being governments themselves, they find it easier to deal with large, government-like organisations. Lineham believes this means Australian arts festivals suffer from a form of gigantism. ‘The government very much likes to deal with big entities. It’s interesting to watch Brisbane merging all their festivals … I know Melbourne is a little more broken up than that but at the same time, there’s still five or six great big behemoth things. And those cities prefer to have one big all-encompassing festival than ten little ones.’

For arts festivals that are smaller and younger, this policy trend has had a powerfully retarding effect. Earlier this year Events NSW, the tourism and marketing arm of the New South Wales Government, announced a $30 million suite of festivals and events based around the Opera House it called ‘Vivid Sydney’. With splashy promotion and the imprimatur of Brian Eno, specially flown in to program one of the events, the project was self-consciously targeted at Sydney’s image problem as a dirty and not particularly ‘creative’ city. For a tired Labor government limping towards electoral oblivion, it was cheap PR, despite Eno’s mediocre program. But for Sydney’s struggling emerging arts sector, it was a bit like being told you didn’t exist.

Imogen Semmler directs Underbelly, perhaps one of Sydney’s most interesting emerging arts events. Despite almost no support from Arts NSW, the event has boot-strapped its way to becoming the closest thing Sydney has to a fringe festival. From the perspective of those volunteering to try to start an arts event, watching a dump truck of money poured into the Opera House must have been difficult.

With Vivid Sydney and Events NSW it’s different because what you’ve got an organisation that’s funded through tourism, they’re interested in promoting Sydney, it’s an umbrella thing and it’s about branding.

There’s a lot of things existing in Sydney and there’s a lot of great arts events … rather than creating these new events and these new brands, why don’t you try and sell what’s there already? It’s as though they think that maybe there isn’t anything, but there’s so much in Sydney. We don’t have a fringe festival, but we’ve got five fringe-like festivals all running.

Jeff Khan directs Next Wave, a unique festival that is in some ways a hybrid of the traditional and the fringe-festival models. It gets by with very little funding, despite being just about the only platform in the country that supports and commissions new work from Australia’s thousands of emerging artists across many disciplines. The struggles of Next Wave, despite a glowing reputation in the broader industry, demonstrate how hard it can be for festival models that don’t fit the big, splashy mould:

It’s always been a multi-platform festival, and when you have so many art forms side by side for so long, eventually they start to cross-pollinate. Because we’re not sitting at that major festivals level and we’re working with young contemporary artists, our role is to be a bit of a laboratory for new art practice, not only new artists but new kinds of art, hence the interdisciplinary focus in recent years. There’s not many institutions in Australia which support the creation of that kind of work.

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Whatever the eventual shape of Australian festivals infrastructure, however, it seems in the medium term they will continue to grow. If there was a consistent theme that emerged from my research right across the sector, it was the unstoppable human desire for celebration and assembly.

‘Australians just like to party,’ Paul Grabowksy said, and just about everyone agreed. ‘I think the festival consciousness is pretty much in full flower at the moment,’ remarked Hume, while Sheehy thinks it’s ‘absolutely in our DNA’. Several directors used the term ‘social animals’ in the same context.

Given the diverse economic and demographic trends driving the sector, the growth of festivals could continue for some time yet. Even the recession doesn’t seem to be making a big impact. Just for the moment, festivals are like a house party where no-one wants to go home.

Note
The author would like to thank the following people for their assistance with writing this essay: Christie Anthoney, Rosemary Cameron, Kristy Edmunds, Lindy Hume, Cathy Hunt, Jeff Khan, Fergus Lineham, Fiona Maxwell, Beau McCafferty, Emily Sexton, Leo Schofield, Imogen Semmler, Brett Sheehy, Anthony Steel, Will Todd and Malia Walsh.