Festivals - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Beside this policy of good will and generosity towards the local artistic community,
a responsible and intelligent festival director will seek to develop a relationship with
the infrastructure of the civic society in its own place and thus deploy the festival for
the creation both of the artistic and social capital. Originally, the tradition of festivals
is linked to the local festivities, celebrations and communal holidays which provided
models for the intermingling of ritual and artistic elements and symbolic rendering of
social relations, hierarchies and privileges. Today, most festivals have lost this celebratory
energy and the capacity to involve in the festive manner various constituencies
of the local community. One could also argue that most festivals cater to a very small
social group of artistic and intellectual elite or to transitory social groups such as
tourists rather than to a broad community of the local residents. In order to justify the
disposition of public subsidies, public authorities with increased frequency demand
festivals to enlarge and diversify their core audience, to prove that they are making
their best to surpass the boundaries of an elite public.
To fulfill this mandate simply as a marketing operation usually is not enough. Local
communities contain too much divergence and too many specific constituencies to be
approached through a marketing mix alone. Clever festival directors have learned that
they need to identify and nurture their own ambassadors in various constituencies
and that they can extract more curiosity and engagement by interacting with carefully
chosen local civic groups. Building a relationship means in turn sharing responsibility
and making the members of local civic groups participants and not just consumers.
That was the strategy deployed by Peter Sellars in 1990 and 1992 in the Los Angeles
International Festival, when he decided to anchor the visiting theater companies
from the Pacific Rim in many ethnic neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Sellars in fact
promoted the artistic and social infrastructure of these ethnic neighbourhoods into
the role of a primary host, thus ensuring the critical mass of curiosity for the work
imported but also creating a tension between traditional and innovative arts, from the
homeland and from the diasporic communities.
In preparing the program of Copenhagen Cultural Capital of Europe 1997, Trevor
Davies started already in 1993 and consciously focused on young teenagers who were
expected to become his prime audience when the mega-festival of almost 11 months
length was to start few years later. Equally, he realized the constraints of Copenhagen
as a relatively small city and set up collaborative ties with some 50 neighbouring
communities, working with their public officials in order to link them to his complex
programming. Generational focus and regionalisations were his strategies to sustain a
festival of huge programming volume. And yet, as it often happens with the Cultural
Capitals of Europe program, the saturation point of the audience was reached in a few
months only, much before the end of the festivities.
34
Within a modern metropolis, a festival could be seen as a tool to rephrase centre/periphery
polarisations and dichotomies. LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre)
decided some years ago to bring challenging contemporary art work to the tough