Festivals - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Programming internationally means in fact pooling a specific production out of its
native context and fitting it in the receptive context of a festival or of a venue’s international
season, a delicate intercultural transfer where habits, traditions, styles, curiosities
and of course language play a role. A programmer takes considerable risks in
such an operation, hoping to surprise and challenge own audience with something
unexpected and yet engaging, to jolt and provoke the receptive habits of the audience.
On a minimalist level, a programmer is offering an information how the performing
arts are made elsewhere, hoping to expand the knowledge and understanding of its
own core audience. On another, more ambitious level, the programmer hopes to affect
the creative patterns in his/her own performing arts context and stimulate them by introducing
a piece from abroad from some previously unexpected artistic development.
On a more abstract level, one could see the international programming as a conscious
investment in the intercultural competence of the audience, a carefully organized experience
that aims to make the public respect, understand and appreciate the cultural
difference as embodied in the imported performance.
Increasingly, festivals appear not only as presenters but as producers as well. They do
seek interesting productions made elsewhere to bring to their own program but also
strive to create new work in an international context, by bringing together artists from
different cultures and countries. Almost every self-respecting festival appears today in
the role of the producer or co-producer as well as presenter. For a festival, engaging in
a new production is a way to affirm its own value and purpose, its specific function of
creating new artistic capital and to take pride in operating as an artistic catalyst that
enables different artists to work together on a new piece – something that normally
would not take place. Increasingly theatre companies also produce work involving international
artists, and not just invite a guest director, choreographer or stage designer
from abroad, but through complex partnerships, thus following the working model
developed by the festivals.
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Even though the notion of the national state has been significantly eroded in the last
few decades, there is still the tendency to see international cultural cooperation as an
engagement of nations and states and not primarily as a relationship of artists among
themselves. Among festival directors one could find a fair amount of opportunistic
operators as anywhere else – I am referring to those who will one season focus on the
performing arts from Portugal and another that of Poland, caring in fact not much for
the either but seeing this an easy way to obtain funds from the Portuguese and then the
Polish government while claiming that they fulfil a mission of European significance
and that they introduce their audience to the cultural diversity of Europe. For more sophisticated
festival directors in the role of presenters and producers, the programming
choice is made on the basis of the artists and companies involved and not countries of
origin. A programming bloc or a new production on the festival program is emerging
from the ambition to introduce or to couple specific artistic talents and not to hang up
a flag of this or that country in exchange for a chunk of government subsidy.