Sitting at my little wine-stained wooden desk in Berlin, it finally feels like there is a bit of time for your correspondent to rest. It's been a long few months, which the absence of writing activity proves. Summer is normally easier in Berlin, but this time seems like an exception - the challenges mount, there is no end to the work, most of it seems urgent, and looking back only seems like a trail of missed opportunities for intervention.
The thing is that, as I have previously mentioned, from my little desk I observe a period in which a particular version or idea of culture dies. Depending on your point of view, this can be an extreme thing or not. What does it matter that performing artists are not able to continue their practice anymore? What does it matter that training has stopped, or that our collective cultural fitness has been lost? Is it a problem that we have forgotten how to talk to each other without a screen, that people have retreated into little bubbles, and the ability to cross those bubbles - to access spaces and situations that enable that - have been removed?
As much as I might try to navigate around it and produce optimistic and resistant actions, the last 18 months have been a feeling of not only watching much of what I love die, as so many artists give up their traditions and culture becomes a strange surfac-y mix of Netflix, Zoom conferences and live Sport. There's also a heavy sense of despair and fear for this great unknown - what happens when you remove the openness from communities? What happens when they can no longer change? What happens to our resistance when culture and its workers are implored to just roll over and die? What about criticism - what becomes of our critical thinking, when there is nothing to write about - nothing to discuss? Can we reflect anymore on phenomena in our situation? Or are we too close to it, too involved, too intertwined with the headline to even respond with anything other than hot-blooded outrage?
Of course, there are nuances the story I have told here, and many exceptions. But for me, it is difficult to avoid this narrative, and I see it everywhere around me.
Happily, on a purely personal note, things have been going along pretty smoothly and the next period will also see me do quite a bit of writing, which I am excited about. I will detail these projects as they come up. For now, I want to dedicate some writing space to a particular event that has occupied a lot of my thinking lately, and which strikes at a few of the questions I have outlined above.
FAKI FESTIVAL 24: SHOULD IT HAVE HAPPENED?
In December 2020, I was invited to be Artistic Director of Faki Festival 24, the festival I have visited and written about on this platform and others for the last 7 years, and where I claim to have seen the best theatre in Europe. To say this was a dream come true is both an understatement and also an absurdity - it's a festival that is pretty painful to love, being run on few financial resources in a former factory in Zagreb, Croatia. Artists stay in squat-like conditions, perform in makeshift stages or found spaces, and the entire festival is without fees and staffed largely by volunteers. It is 100% dependent on exactly the community togetherness that I have detailed above as being obliterated during the pandemic.
Leading the festival in this moment - and 2021 will be the only year I will do it - created quite a lot of agonising on my part. As someone who is able to read data sceptically - question it, refer to various sources, and reach 'best possible' conclusions rather than 'correct' ones - I was positioned pretty well to make decisions. Nevertheless, the resources available to the festival for decision-making in the pandemic were very low, as was the capacity to plan for contingency scenarios.
I'm proud to say that we largely managed this situation. The festival achieved its objectives of full (reduced) houses, inviting international artists to mix in a reasonably safe environment, and created togetherness of a kind not seen by many for 18 months. It was my first time in the theatre since March 2020 - over a year, ridiculous when writing theatre criticism is what you do.
Nevertheless, there were undoubtedly risks to proceeding with the festival. Having people in close proximity to each other, in a situation without the resources to install official protocols is imperfect. Create a space where people feel empowered and they will inevitably try to push that empowerment to the limit - especially if they have been locked in a cage for a little while. Many of the things we love about the festival involve an exchange that's partly bodily, and some of that was unavoidable. My worst nightmares were naturally being the one responsible for the death of someone's grandparent, and that's a responsibility I took seriously - and even if I don't know about it, I acknowledge that it may have happened anyway.
So the question remains, for others as well as for me: should the festival have happened?
Although different types of cancellation remained an ever-present possibility, the desperation of the situation as I perceive it meant cancellation was never really on the cards. Faki 24 benefited hugely from the previous Faki 23, where a team led by Dina Karadžić and Vedran Gligo devised a totally online format, showing the works to online audiences in a partly-customised forum. The 'hybrid' format Faki 24 meant that the worst-case scenario was to fall back on this online-only option, and asking the artists who had planned to come to Zagreb to hastily adapt their works to video, in a kind of giant experiment. Less extreme than this would have been asking that of only those who were coming from far away, like Spain or Germany, to do so.
Photo of Luan Machado in his show I'm not a robot
Even without the event of an outbreak of COVID-19 virus at the end of May in Croatia, these conversations and calculations happened anyway. The 28 artists and groups involved in Faki 24 made their decisions based on individual circumstances and in dialogue with the festival. Our extremely limited resources were used to build contingency and resilience as much as possible, so that we had bases covered and were thinking of ways to continue the festival in whatever way that was possible. Complete cancellation must be on the table - but only as a last resort, knowing that the cost to culture of not doing the festival is high, and considering that cost (and culture generally) as real, tangible things.
While I don't live in Australia, it's sometimes my reference point because I know it quite well, there is a large array of perspectives, a large white mono-culture, and almost no social consensus. This means you can find examples for almost anything there, and that makes it a great sandbox for corporations, but also an interesting object of study for me. In this case, an outbreak of COVID-19 in Australia occurred just as a much-better funded festival than Faki, called "Rising", was about to take place. The festival was billed as a massive act of cultural resistance, a huge coming together in celebration of culture. As soon as the outbreak happened and the government declared restrictions on gathering, the entire festival was cancelled, citing a noble support for public health.
It is interesting to read statements from the organisers in media, which focus on how agonising the decision was, and how heart-breaking, and how all artists would be paid out of their contracts. This seems to me, as someone organising a much smaller festival at the same time n Europe, to be not nearly enough. Artists need audiences, the best support is a possibility to continue their work - money is just one of these. It is not enough to say 'but we paid you'. The scenario of an outbreak of COVID-19 should have been the first scenario that was planned for, and a way of continuing should have been found. The organisers talk of accepting the 'risk' of the festival, by which they mean the financial risk. Not the risk of not making art.
Contrast the language used by Rising organisers Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek with that of the Melbourne International Film Festival here, where statements to the media were mostly about the nightmare of planning various contingencies and building flexibility into the programming (for example, by using drive-ins, or a variety of other spaces).
Again, without being too black-and-white about this, and certainly acknowledging that a festival of live performance and of film are completely different things at the moment, it seems to me that one of these festivals was assuming that culture will always be there. The other understood that culture is not automatic, and must be consciously fought for, against forces that view it as inconvenient and would prefer that it disappear. One of these approaches is actually resilient. The other is extremely fragile, and places culture in the hands of outside forces, and not in the hands of people.
One final example - Victorian Opera made record profits in the pandemic year, apparently largely because they did not have to produce any actual " expensive opera productions". Without dwelling on the level of truth to this (I think it probably is 'fairly true'), we can see how the situation trends towards the destruction of artistic practice rather than its continuation. Art would be better if it didn't exist. It's an absurd time to work in culture - where it's never been so important, and so alienated.
Even in situations where culture is heavily supported as a concept, from looking around at the moment, it's not enough. The amount of support is obviously not enough to avert a huge and unprecedented cultural transformation that has happened in the last 18 months. Students of cultural history might observe that these events often precede large political and military transformations.
While cultural workers may be exhausted and depleted, the work has never been more important. It is important that the energy is found somewhere. But where?
My stint as Artistic Director of Faki Festival finished officially on 30th May, as the festival went into caretaker mode while the next festival is prepared. You can keep track of the developments for next year on Faki's social media - https://www.facebook.com/faki.festival/
Video - Želimir Schauer
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