Читать книгу What Works: Success in Stressful Times - Hamish McRae - Страница 10

Edinburgh has long had a lot of things going for it-things that would naturally make it the ideal backdrop for an arts and entertainment festival. It is, physically, the most beautiful city in Britain, with its castle, its gardens, its medieval Old Town and its Georgian squares. It is a capital city and-important in the entertainment world-an English-speaking one. But none of this, of course, would have been enough. There are at least three special features about the Edinburgh Festival that carry a message for other cities seeking to develop their own special face to the world.

Lesson one is the willingness to create and permit a completely open marketplace. This means accepting that what happens cannot be controlled. Edinburgh has tended this marketplace wisely, not by piling in huge amounts of money or building infrastructure, but rather by clearing bureaucratic blockages that might stifle it. For example, one of the keys to the Fringe’s success is the use of unconventional performance spaces, often in old buildings designed for another purpose.²³ That means applying sensitive fire and access regulations-to make sure audiences really are safe-rather than insisting that venues fit box-ticking requirements.

It also means accepting that the city will, for one month, be a quite different place from what it is during the rest of the year. Residents and businesses alike in effect lose control of the centre of their city. It is business, of course, but it is also disruption. Were it badly managed, the disruption could damage the core activities that drive the city through the rest of the year. All tourist centres have to cope to some extent with surges of visitors with different values to the locals, but this is extreme stuff. The lesson therefore is not just to permit the creation of a market but also to relish it.

Lesson two is to blend top-down and bottom-up. There is no single mind planning what happens in Edinburgh; there are and always have been lots of minds, which work in different ways. Some of these, such as the director and governing body of the International Festival, have to exert a top-down discipline. The companies performing have to be invited. Funding has to be found, venues secured and the events publicized. To get the right mix, there has to be some artistic direction.

At the Fringe, by contrast, the minds have to focus almost exclusively on logistics. They do not concern themselves about the artistic merit of the performers; all they have to do is make sure that anyone who fills the basic requirements is able to set up a show, for this is entirely a bottom-up exercise. There is, however, one crucial function that the Fringe performs beyond logistics. This is teaching.

Every year it holds a series of seminars to show would-be performers and promoters how to put on a show. These include: how much the different venues will cost; how to manage publicity; the timescale for decisions; the need to go for as long a run as possible to cover costs, and so on. It is in the interests of everyone that people go into the project aware of the costs and how to budget for them. Even performers have to eat.

The trick, which the various organizers of the Edinburgh festivals have managed to pull off, is to achieve balance-to plan but not to over-plan, to lead but also to follow the demands of the market.

That leads to the third lesson: the need to listen. This has been central to Edinburgh’s development at three stages.

First, what started as a conventional arts festival, and might have remained so, was swiftly transformed by the demands of the market into something much bigger. Had there been no uninvited guests at the first party, the Fringe might never have taken off.

Second, in the middle years, Edinburgh allowed market forces to develop the Fringe, rather than trying to stifle it. Technically, the Fringe has become extremely innovative, from the first comprehensive programme to the centralized ticket office and, later, to internet booking.

Third, whenever a new festival wanted to tag along, it was welcomed. So films and TV, jazz and books were all grafted onto the official and Fringe core. This tradition continued into 2004 with the formal addition of the art festival-though as I noted earlier, the visual arts had been represented at Edinburgh for many years in an informal way.

By chance, on a visit to the festival in 2007, I met the key person in bringing modern visual arts to Edinburgh-a man called Richard Demarco,²⁴ who grabbed me by the arm and taught me something else. A tiny, mercurial Italian Scot in his late seventies, he had gone as a 17-year-old to the very first festival-and been so enchanted that he decided to devote his life to bringing art to Edinburgh.

And so over the years a string of European and Scottish artists had their works exhibited in Edinburgh at Richard Demarco’s gallery, and in 2007 his archive was put on display at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street. It was an amazing jumble of stuff, bringing together the work of renowned artists such as Joseph Beuys²⁵ and Richard Demarco’s role in the whole festival scene. (He had, for example, co-founded the Traverse Theatre²⁶ in 1963.)

As we talked, two things became clear-two things at the core of the spirit of Edinburgh. One is that it is vital for the different aspects of art to commingle; theatre should not be separate from the visual arts-it is all part of the whole. And, of course, Edinburgh mixes everything together. The other is that you need failure; people need to be free to fail. Richard Demarco himself always maintains that he set out on his career in the arts because he had failed his exams at school, but the point is much bigger.

What I think Edinburgh does is to create a platform not just where people can feel free to experiment but also one where they do not need to worry if it does not work. There is surely a wider message there: individual failure is an essential part of the wider success of almost all enterprises-and absolutely to a venture as huge and amorphous as the Edinburgh Festival.

•Create an open marketplace •Blend top-down and bottom-up •Listen-and accept failure as part of wider success