Arts festivals at the crossroads

Twenty years ago, Ireland had very few arts festivals, but now the artisticcelebrations never stop. Is it time to rethink our ideas before festival-itis overwhelms us? asks Ian Kilroy

It's summer, although you'd hardly know it, and bunting will soon go up from Galway to Kilkenny, from Belfast to Boyle. The sound of pounding drums will echo in the narrow streets of innumerable Irish towns, as arts festival parades snake and samba their way between the showers. The doors of exhibitions will be thrown open. Very soon now, the circus will be in town.

Any self-respecting Irish urban centre now has an arts festival of some description. It may be nothing more than the girls and boys from the local secondary school hammering out percussion in drag, or it may be as professional and sophisticated as Galway's or Kilkenny's.

It's a far cry from the 1970s. Then, next to nothing in cultural terms happened beyond the Pale - well, in the spheres of theatre, visual art and street spectacle, at any rate. Galway changed all that. After the arrival of the Galway Arts Festival in 1977, the Irish cultural landscape never looked the same again.

In the intervening years, festivals have mushroomed in every corner of the island. Audiences have become sophisticated and the festivals themselves have got bigger and bigger. From staging a few locally produced events by local artists, festivals such as Galway and Kilkenny grew into platforms for huge international performances and outdoor spectacles. At first, such festivals had to be self-financing, but once they had proved themselves, the Arts Council rowed in with funds. In 1999, 61 festivals were in receipt of revenue grants from the Arts Council. That jumped to 82 in 2001, entailing an Arts Council expenditure on festivals last year of around €3.25 million, with nine individual festivals receiving grants of more than €100,000.

The other main source of income for festivals is the private sector, principally in the form of sponsorship. Hence, we have the Eircom Dublin Theatre Festival and the Murphy's Cat Laughs Festival. Between 1987 and 1997, Irish-based business sponsorship of the arts went from £1.5 million annually to £10.2 million. The other main source of income for festivals, box office returns, has also increased significantly in recent years.

The increased resources available helps to explain the proliferation of arts festivals throughout the country, but if more is not necessarily better, it is worthwhile to pose the question whether this outbreak of festival- itis is a good thing. What are arts festivals for, and do we need so many of them?

For Rose Parkinson, director of the Galway Arts Festival, a festival is first and foremost a celebration: "Galway is about celebrating the arts in general, Dublin Theatre Festival is about celebrating theatre. Celebration is about the best of what's available. You bring in international work of the highest standards and you nurture Irish work of the highest standards."

Ali Curran, formerly director of the Dublin Fringe Festival and current artistic director of the Peacock Theatre, says a festival is "a great opportunity for celebration, it should be a time for celebrating the arts". For Maureen Kennelly, director of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, a festival is "a very intense, compressed period of artistic activity".

What is common to these concepts of the arts festival is the idea that it should occur over a focused period of time, usually annually and usually sometime over the spring to summer months. For the multi-disciplinary arts festival, that means taking the Galway template and adapting it to local conditions. But this is a template that some large overseas festivals are now abandoning, or at least reviewing.

The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) is a case in point. Once operating on a basis similar to Galway's, LIFT has now abandoned its annual festival in favour of staggered events occurring over a couple of months. It is still, however, known as the LIFT festival, despite the time-frame employed. In Australia, the Melbourne Arts Festival has also abandoned the traditional multi-disciplinary model, opting for a themed festival each year: text, body, voice.

With many Irish arts festivals now well into maturity, is there not a danger of repetition, of staleness caused by using the same model over and over again? Is it time for Irish festivals to change?

Rose Parkinson says that change is vital, but not to the extent that LIFT and Melbourne have chosen.

"You can't keep doing the same thing," she says. "Because it worked in 1978 doesn't mean that it's going to work in 2002 - it won't . . . The only way that you can progress is to create work. You can't just be a receiving festival, that just doesn't work any more. It particularly doesn't work because there are so many festivals in Ireland now. Sometimes when I approach a company for the festival, I find out that they've already been approached by two other Irish festivals."

Galway is therefore attempting something more unusual. It commissions and produces new work, pairs artists together and sees what comes to light, while also showcasing new Irish work and hosting big international shows that wouldn't otherwise be seen in Ireland.

The Dublin Fringe Festival, Kilkenny, and many other festivals have gone the same way, functioning as producers and offering a unique "product" - that horrible word - to their audiences. This approach has ensured that overlapping of programmes is avoided and that each festival can retain its own distinctive flavour.

That distinctiveness of identity is something that also stems from a sense of place. Maureen Kennelly says that, in Kilkenny, the programme is devised with the local audience in mind.

Rose Parkinson says the same of Galway: "You've got a responsibility to the place that the festival exists in. Galway Arts Festival has a responsibility to Galway - to Galway artists and audiences. We showcase local work alongside international work - everyone is billed more or less equally."

The physical structure and location of an urban centre also makes its mark strongly on a festival. Kilkenny's medieval layout is suited to street performance; Galway speaks of summer and the sea and bright colours, even if it does rain much of the time; Belfast and Cork have their charms and peculiarities. But with the glut of festivals we have now, does each and every one have enough distinguishing features to justify its continuing existence?

Arts consultant Doireann Ní Bhriain, who recently completed a review of festival policy for the Arts Council, to be published in July, argues that the hike in festival attendances tells all.

"While I wouldn't advocate funding every festival the length and breadth of the country, people are going and people are voting with their feet," she says.

As the Arts Council only funds festivals that are doing well, there must be a demand for the 82 festivals that the council funded last year (the Arts Council has, after all, had a reactive rather than a pro-active approach to funding festivals up until now). As for the LIFT and Melbourne experiments, Ni Bhriain thinks that such adjustments are not suited to the Irish festival environment.

"These developments happen in response to the environment of any given place and whatever the audience environment is," she says. "Successful Irish arts festivals now are in tune with their audiences. I think that it's difficult to make comparisons with LIFT, which is in a huge conurbation like London, or with Melbourne for that matter. I don't think pulling a model from somewhere else and importing it here would work."

Soaring attendances and the proliferation of festivals throughout Ireland doesn't mean that all is rosy, however. For starters, Irish festivals operate under budgets that are a fraction of those enjoyed by festivals overseas, such as Edinburgh, and the loss-making and hugely expensive Adelaide Festival.

"Budgets are small here," says Ní Bhriain. "In the international context, Irish festivals operate on a shoestring, but still they make it happen very well."

GALWAY, for example, with a turnover of around €900,000, this year received €260,000 from the Arts Council. The festival has to make up the other two-thirds of its income from private sponsorship (principally from Guinness) and from box office takings. Kilkenny gets about 47 per cent of its €650,000 from the Arts Council, with the remaining finance coming from ticket sales and a variety of sponsors. Last year, the Dublin Fringe Festival had a budget of £400,000, with around 40 per cent coming from the Arts Council and the rest again coming from sponsors and seat sales. This is a pittance compared to a festival like Adelaide's, which got through a budget of Aus$8 million this year.

What these figures indicate is just how reliant Irish arts festivals are on ticket take-up. Irish festival programmes have to be a hit with ever more demanding and sophisticated audiences, or else festival finances will quickly suffer. One flop at the Galway Arts Festival in 1996 - Kaddish, a show that left many cold and unsatisfied - had repercussions for the box office even the following year. It is clear that the days of loose and lazy programming are, by necessity, long behind us. The festival sector has become ever more professional.

AND YET that professionalism does not extend to some key areas. The seasonal nature of festival life means there are down periods when offices are not staffed and phones ring unanswered. Websites and online booking facilities often leave a lot to be desired. The complexities of marketing, of sourcing sponsorship and public relations, of insurance - these are areas where lack of training and the absence of professional management structures hinder the running and further development of Irish festivals.

Festival boards of directors are usually made up of untrained, unpaid voluntary members, with little or no professional training or back-up. The responsibilities and time involved in sitting on such boards suggest that this should be otherwise. It would make sense to have advice and assistance available to board members, usually non-professionals who have responsibility for making key decisions .

There is also a need for more structured networking between festivals. AOIFE, the festivals umbrella group, satisfies this need to an extent, but not all festivals are members, active or otherwise, of the organisation.

Something else that could be improved is the relationship between the arts and tourism sectors. If anything, there is currently a relationship of mistrust between the two. There is an understandable fear in the arts sector that the interests of tourism may run counter to the festivals' primary concern, which is, correctly, with the artist and the audience. Just as the interests of sponsors sometimes prove to be harmful to those of an arts festival - gobbling up its identity, for example, by demanding unreasonable levels of branding - so it is with tourism.

The tourist industry must recognise that the arts are distinct from tourist festivals and events. There is a great difference between a beer festival and an arts festival. The recent lumping together of arts, sport and tourism in John O'Donoghue's new portfolio doesn't help matters. In Europe, most countries have a minister of culture. It is worrying that under this Government we have instead the mix-match portfolio that the former minister for justice has acquired.

But all this emphasis on professionalism shouldn't dilute or play down the importance of the voluntary input into festivals - people giving up their own free time, caring enough to see that their town's festival works, and gaining a sense of ownership of that festival in the process. Yes, our festivals are performing, yes, the Arts Council needs to tighten up its criteria for support for festivals (as it will propose in the implementation document it publishes with Ní Bhriain's review in July) - but it is essential that each festival retains its local colour.

While our festivals have served us well, showcasing the best home-grown talent and exposing audiences to international shows they wouldn't otherwise see, it is time that more financial support came from all quarters. Often, it is the local businesses that benefit most from summer arts festivals that put least back in. That must change.

Also vital to planning any future for our festivals is audience research, something that is now manifestly lacking and that the Arts Council needs to carry out. And whatever shape our arts festivals take in the future, let's hope that there's still room for the girls and boys from the local secondary school, hammering on their drums, decked out in drag.