Festival time

SANJOY K. ROY

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EDINBURGH, Cannes, Rio, Hay on Wye, Avignon and Glastonbury, are synonymous with the festivals they host ranging from theatre, film, literature, street parades and music. Festivals are strange creatures and though every city, town, village and street tends to churn out at least one a year, few actually find their place in the sun and become truly national or international in nature representing the best of that particular discipline.

The focus of most festivals is to create a platform for expression, whatever the medium, in an effort to entertain and enlighten audiences. Some of the best festivals go many steps beyond and become beacons of light, attracting tens of thousands of visitors. Most local governments view this as an economic activity, which brings in much needed revenue to a city or a village, boosting the local economy. The Edinburgh Festival, the world’s largest performing arts festival comprising of the International Festival, Festival Fringe, Literature Festival and the Tattoo, brings in an annual infusion of over 115 million pounds of additional income to the city and an equal amount to the regions that surround the festival. The Cannes Film Festival brings in 250-300 million euro of revenue to the famed Riviera over the ten day period when the world’s glamorous set descend in their monogrammed jets and luxury yachts!

 

Hay on Wye located on the Wye River on the border of England and Wales is a sleepy hamlet in the back of beyond. Set amidst the spectacular Black Mountains of Wales, it has traditionally been the home of second-hand bookstores. Nestled in its narrow cobbled streets are early 19th century converted homes where you can browse for a first edition Hemingway or Proust, and where many bookshops boast of stocking every book ever to have been published in the world. This sleepy town of a few thousand people plays host to the world’s largest literature festival attracting tens of thousands of people. This year they sold over 185,000 tickets for their readings, discussions, debates and children’s sessions netting over two million GBP at the gate.

The region itself, in the radius of a 100 km, hosts over 150,000 people who drive in to be part of this great debate with b&b’s, hotels and inn’s booked out nine months in advance. Londoners and those from Wales and the Midlands drive down making the most of the bank holiday weekend. Complete families with their dogs (there is a strict no entry for this four legged creature due to the presence of children) camp out in fields, a friend’s garden, or in their caravan, praying for good weather which is as likely as the Labour Party winning the next general election in the UK. Last year they had the fire brigade pumping out water from the field and the car parks to avoid any accidents.

Having bought out a camping store, our host Susie Nicklin, Head of Literature, British Council, had come kilted out with wellies (designer brand Wellingtons), waterproof cap, all weather coat, brolly and so on and warned us novices as to our foolishness not to have done the same. Having escaped Delhi’s summer, we seemed to have carried with us sunny skies, much to Susie’s chagrin!

Hay on Wye sports a warm welcoming ‘off the masses’ kind of ambience, unlike its close competitor for the world’s biggest literature festival – the Edinburgh International Literary Festival – which is a formal affair with less than half the attendance. Set in a field where it moved a few years ago, having outgrown the Hay on Wye village from where it gets its name, the festival is hosted in a cluster of marquees built around open courtyards speckled with low-slung canvas chairs and benches. On a rare sunny day, families and friends picnic in these courtyards in a picture-perfect setting replete with fresh (though not organic) strawberries with Welsh clotted cream or natural ice cream!

 

Unknown to many, festivals rake in sizeable income from their bars, restaurants and bookshops. Hay on Wye Festival had four public bars, four restaurants including one that served the best venison burger and a slew of food stands and stalls serving up the exotic and mundane. For those more gastronomically inclined, the region has some of the best restaurants including the famed The Felin Fach Griffin, which served up a delicately flavoured hake, a well brought-up rabbit and divine deserts and Tipple and Tiffin (in Brecon), which is all that the name promises to be including producing the best duck I have had outside of the one cooked by Nelson Fernandez some years ago! The locally brewed beer available only in the region is staple fare for most visitors.

Run by sheer ‘charm power’ by Peter Florence and Lyndy Cooke, the festival is a family business set up by Peter’s parents 21 years ago. Peter was brought up to assume that a festival was what life is all about (a hazardous upbringing!). Having learnt the ropes from his parents, he took it over, put in some smart marketing and grew the festival out of hearth and home and moved it down the road to a meadow; then just in case he got bored with the Welsh countryside, he multiplied the brand many times over. The Hay groupies follow him and his troopers across the world ensconced in a miasma of debate and intellectual thought. The Hay team runs ten festivals the world over, choosing exotic locations in Spain’s Granada island and Brazil (India should be their next stop!).

Contrary to popular belief the festival has limited fiction and is replete with non-fiction writers expounding on climate change, the environment, human rights, migration, biographies and histories, linguistics, international politics and more obscure subjects. Combine this with the glamorous presence of the likes of Bill Clinton, Robert Kennedy Jr, Hannah Rothschild, Rowan Williams, Paddy Ashdown, Alan Bennet, Monica Ali, Sting, and this is only a sample, and you have a successful programme mix.

 

This year Climate Change continued to be an overriding theme with talks on Earth, Wind, Fire and Water forming the opening day sessions and bringing together the likes of Robin Todd, Rosie Boycott, Khalid Koser, Sue Miller, Chikondi Mpokosa, John Ashton, Malini Mehra, Lyla Mehta and Daniela Schmidt in a series of conversations to address global change, fusion of indigenous and traditional cultures with science and the need for sustainable practices. Anthony Giddens’ lecture on the politics of climate change failed to throw up any new take on this much abused subject, whereas Roger Crowley’s ‘Empires of the Sea’ had a packed to the rafters, 800 strong audience enthralled by the 16th century Mediterranean maritime battles between Islam and Christianity that set the frontiers that hold even today. Legendary Rick Wakeman turned out to be a great rock storyteller, while Gillian Beer spoke about the Culture of Extinction: Darwin and Beyond, where she propounded Darwin’s theory which holds that extinction is a natural process of evolution and should not necessarily be viewed in alarmist terms as scientists tend to do in our overheated climate change debate.

 

The enfant terrible of the art world Jake and Dino Chapman were in conversation about what inspires them or doesn’t, and how their work has evolved or hasn’t. For those of you who have seen their work at Moma or the Tate and have taken in the exhibition Fucking Hell (2008), Great Deeds against the Dead (1994) or Hell (1999), or Like a Dog Returns to its Vomit (2005), will recollect that they stirred controversy by using Goya’s celebrated art pieces as the backdrop to their work or as some critics say they vandalized Goya in the hope of acclaim! Sessions that I would have loved to catch but was unable to stay for, included a conversation with Sting on his new operatic work, with Alan Bennett playwright, novelist and diarist, and with Mahmood Mamdani, hailed by the Times as one of the world’s ten brightest thinkers of our age!

Festival programmers tend to look at popular culture and programme fewer lesser-known acts, authors, musicians, and so on, always keeping a keen eye on their receding bottom line in an effort to ensure that box office takes will balance the usually unbalanced budget. In Hay there is no such thought and on the face of it there seems to be no such fear. The crowds pour in and book out every available seat. So as a visitor if you have not been sensible and booked your session in advance (or have a charming festival director wave you into the most crowded venue), you will find the ‘sold out’ sign at the entrance for most sessions.

The venues themselves range from a cosy 100 to the overwhelming 1500 seater Guardian stage. Left out in the cold (literally) you then have an option to sit and munch on fish and chips or drink champagne and pig out on strawberries. If you have young children (heaven forbid), you glide-glassy eyed to the children’s space which thoughtfully is out of sight and tucked away at one end with large signs, ‘be warned – children abound’, ‘enter at your own risk’, ‘are you ensured?’ Soundproofed or otherwise, I did not hear a scream, screech or indeed spot more than one bawling child leading his comatose father by the hand in search of a live pony!

 

Successful festivals are driven by a small group of diehard, somewhat eccentric, self-driven power houses, who are committed to raise resources, sell their grandmothers, divorce their children and provide a level of hospitality and care that bowls over the visiting performers or speakers and ensures that through word of mouth this becomes the place to be to signal your arrival as an artiste, author or star turned artist! The problem with this model is that once the powerhouse grows long in the tooth, has a heart attack having seen the latest profit or loss statement, or has to be carried out by those men in white, there are few people still standing ready to carry forth this legacy.

New entrants often try and reinvent the wheel with drastic results, (the director Edinburgh Fringe Festival who took over from Paul Gudgin last year ran the festival to the ground in the space of a few months, with the box office crashing, empty houses, audiences not being able to book tickets and producers losing an arm and a leg – he has since resigned!).

 

Hay on Wye and the Perth International Literary Festival have been exceptions. Whilst Perth has surrendered its pre-eminent position (primarily because it’s at the end of the world), Hay on Wye has grown from strength to strength – mostly because of the maine to ma ka doodh piya hai syndrome, where Peter was weaned in surroundings that spoke of leather bound books and inherited or acquired an incredible team of dedicated festival organizers. Lyndy Cooke, both Director and Administrator of the festival and a horse enthusiast to boot, ensures that the ten day event is turned around with minimal fuss and maximum success. The slew of festival volunteers who write in to beg for a coveted spot as usher, guide, parking attendant, bin cleaner, child minder or artiste liaison person, go a long way in creating the atmosphere that makes for a successful festival.

The Edinburgh Festival and venues like the Assembly Halls, Pleasance and Underbelly, also depend on this kind of youth enthusiasm to keep the median age at a festival well below the average 40 that it would otherwise be. On the other hand festivals like Cannes pay everyone and are quite snooty about the volunteer class and view them as free riders (which they may well be. Who would not do their best to usher Bradgelina to their seat or clean a speck of dust off the red carpet before Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise!)

 

Recently the Jaipur Literature Festival has thrown its hat into the ring to find a place amongst the best festivals of the world. Crowned as the ‘Greatest Literary Show on Earth’ by Tina Brown in the Daily Beast and as ‘the most fabulous literary love-fest on the planet’ by Simon Schama, the five day festival set in the exotic Diggi Palace Hotel is the place to be in Asia. The festival, only a few years old, burst upon the international calendar due in equal parts to a good mix of programming, an exotic setting, the worlds desire to engage with or visit India and the gracious hospitality replete with elephants, fireworks, and a slew of sexy parties!

Dubbed as the Cannes for Literature, the festival has managed to bring together the likes of Ian McEwan, Christopher Hampton, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Kiran Desai, Simon Schama, Pico Aiyer, Colin Thubron, Hari Kunzru, Nicholas Coleridge, Thomas Keneally amongst others. Julia Roberts was spotted with her baby, Aamir Khan came and stayed, Amitabh arrived and left, and Anupam Kher lent his voice and views at the festivals ending debate! Nandan Nilekani was seen trying to get into a venue and the likes of Nandita Das, Gulzar, Tarun Tejpal, Leela Seth and the good and great of Mumbai and Delhi lined up with the many lovers of literature to get their lunch plate or try and find a chair in one of the many venues. It is a rare festival where there are no reserved seats for VIPs, no green rooms for the august gathering of authors, and no privileges for the most important of sponsors or their guests.

This formula in a sense works and has charmed both audiences and writers alike. Everyone loves the winter sun in Jaipur and the need to be out there with their fans (Chetan Bhagat was trailed by a tribe of teenage school children and Vikram Seth had a brood of women doting at his every word). In the midst of all this are writers from the many different languages of India which are yet to be hailed nationally or internationally. More and more there is a growing audience of publishers, agents and fans who know the work of these magical authors who the media in their folly and unreal worlds still have to give newsprint space to.

 

All successful festivals have this unique charm of transporting their guests to a utopian world in which the arts, thought, debate and talent reign supreme and the realism of their daily lives of unpaid bills and lost opportunities lie at the furthermost corners of their consciousness! Book your seats now for the next festival. Edinburgh runs from the first weekend of August to mid-September, Jaipur from 21-25 January and Hay on Wye during the last ten days in May.

We need more festivals to showcase the talent that abounds across all regional languages. In middle class India’s mindset (read press), these nameless authors have yet to capture the space and imagination of readers as they have not been translated into English or Hindi. In recent times there has been an outpouring of work in Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Gujarati to name a few. Enterprising publishers, booksellers and promoters need to capture the magic of the written word and present this to a hungry audience! Look forward to many more festivals and a slew of great books!

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