'Don't even think of flogging off flagship Festival'

Published on Tuesday 10 August 2010 15:31

THE director of the Edinburgh International Festival has staged a fierce defence of the arts flagship after claims that it was failing in the shadow of the Fringe.

• Jonathan Mills is pictured on Calton Hill with the flags of countries of the New Worlds of the Americas and Australasia, the theme of this year's Edinburgh International Festival Picture: Jane Barlow

Jonathan Mills warned that to downgrade the institution would be like "flogging off" the national art collections and filling the galleries with work by graffiti artist Banksy.

The curtain goes up on Friday on the 2010 festival, the founding mothership of Edinburgh's August celebration since 1947. Themed on the New Worlds of America and Australasia, Mills's programmed productions run from the sell-out opera Porgy and Bess, with the stormy passions of the American South, to South American theatre and leading world orchestras at the Usher Hall.

It includes Caledonia, the new satire of Scotland's famously failed attempt to colonise Panama.

But on its eve this week, Mills was confronted by unwelcome comparisions between his Festival and the Fringe.

Charlie Wood, the outspoken director of the Underbelly venue - a Fringe powerhouse producing dance, comedy and a major musical this year - said that if the sweeping cuts now facing the English arts scene move north, the "case for the International Festival grows weaker", while the Fringe would stay alive and strong.

The EIF gets more than half its 9 million turnover from government funding, Wood said, when "the era of publicly funded arts we have enjoyed for the last 13 or 15 years may be drawing to a close". The Fringe, by contrast, survives almost entirely on private individuals and companies.

"If the main funding for them did get dramatically cut," Wood said, "let's not get too worried about it. We are going to be left with great art."

Writing in The Scotsman, the commentator Michael Fry said the official Festival should "pack up, close down" and leave the stage to its "lusty offspring", the Fringe.

"We can be Fringey and edgy and comedic and off the wall," said Mills. "But if we are not also serious and large-scale and doing things of true ambition, are we suggesting that, if this was the visual arts, suddenly we should flog all of the contents of the National Gallery of Scotland or the National Gallery in London in the V&A and throw all of that scholarship and all of that patronage out of the window, and all that we need is a Banksy?

"It's nonsense, absolute nonsense. We need a balanced, broad diet. I'm a supporter of Banksy, I think he's amazing, but I'm also a supporter of Turner.

"Everyone talks about the scale of the Fringe. Let's talk about the scale of the International Festival. It's a very different kind of scale. On Saturday night you will see evidence of it, a couple of hundred people on and off stage directly contributing to Porgy and Bess, in the orchestra, on stage, manipulating sound and equipment, making sure it happens. That's not something that the model of a Fringe can actually manage."

Of the Underbelly's signature production this year of Five Guys Named Moe, for example, with a cast of six and a dedicated crew of seven, he said: "That's a very small show for us." Major productions this year like Porgy and Bess or the Gospel at Colonus, by iconic American director Lee Breuer, Mills said, were essential to the diversity of Edinburgh.

"To be taken seriously, to retain your flagship position for everyone, means that there should be the presence of all of these offerings," he said.

The Fringe without the official Festival would be a different animal, he suggested, that could risk turning into "giant comedy festival". The Edinburgh International Festival will have had nearly 5 million in funding this year - 2,437,000 from the City of Edinburgh Council, 2,317,000 from the Scottish Arts Council and 200,000 from the Scottish Government's Expo fund.

The Fringe's core annual funding from the council and the SAC's successor, Creative Scotland, is now less than 200,000 a year. The picture is complicated; there has been other support. The Made in Scotland programme has backed Scottish Fringe companies and management and marketing costs to the tune of 400,000 a year, and box-office failures in 2008 brought a one-off helping grant of 250,000.

But the sum is vastly smaller - while the Fringe will stage 2,453 shows this year, against little over 100 in the main Festival.

It was simply wrong, Mills said, to suggest the EIF was failing to deliver either opera or new work. There was a "completely new large-scale opera" in Montezuma, partly produced in Mexico, and a new production of Bliss from Opera Australia.

"We are bringing opera companies from all over the world," he said, and the event would continue to produce and cast big operas in concert. "We had ten operas last year, we have seven operas this year.

"Do you want to have an operatic experience, or certain kinds of theatre or large dance companies, to say nothing of orchestras? It's not a one-size-fits-all."

The EIF, he insisted, also brought support into Edinburgh this year from international backers - from the US government and the Mexican government to Creative New Zealand, and Australian government funding, in partnership arrangements said to be worth about 300,000.

The Fringe could arguably survive alone, he said, but would be taken far less seriously. "If it all turns into a giant comedy festival one day, that has certainly implications as well".

Kath Mainland, the Fringe chief executive, understood the "robust but fragile arrangements", he said. The two co-authored an editorial defending Edinburgh's "glorious diversity" in The Scotsman this week.

The concern about the Festival's future, and its heavy state funding, is being driven by 25 per cent cuts facing arts organisations in England. "The 25 per cent cuts scenario is something we are all looking at," said Mills, but there is no evidence of it yet.

Arts organisations had to pull together and make the case that they must be ready for when the massive spending on Olympics brings a flood of journalists and punters to the UK, looking for other entertainment.

The Underbelly's Wood also questioned whether the EIF was producing enough new work - suggesting it was mostly relying on touring work, which is "much less interesting". But new productions, Mills insisted, ran from the newly written play of Ernest Hemingway's The Son Also Rises to Birds with Skymirrors, from the Samoan choreographer Lemi Ponifasio.

From work by the Pina Bausch company to Grupo Corpo, he said: "We are far more at the cutting edge internationally than the Fringe can afford to be…"

He cited a "major, major discovery" of the South American playwright Guillermo Calderon and other groups with British, European and world premieres. "We invest in someone who people have never heard of, like Calderon."

He cited several household names in the UK who had their debut in this festival - the UK choroegrapher Matthew Bourne and the US dancer and choreographer Mark Morris. "They were here before anyone else," he said. "My case rests."