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| | How a theatre festival gets programmed
05/08/10, 15:27 11 Comment
As I've mentioned in here before, I co-direct a theatre festival in a town called Newcastle in Australia, and right now we're in the middle of programming. This is the most fun part of the entire process, and it's also fascinating for me to finally see how it works from the inside.
For context: the festival is the Crack Theatre Festival (worst name), and it takes place over four days as part of an umbrella festival called This Is Not Art. TINA consists of 5 festivals: a writers festival, a new media arts festival, a music festival, a postgraduate symposium and us. Each festival has its own co-directors and curates its own lineup, but we produce one joint festival program and share a lot of technical and venue resources, as well as trading artists between festivals. Crack grew out of the writers festival - they had a performance stream over 2007-8, but it grew to the extent that they wanted to separate it. Myself and my co-director took it on, sourced funding for it and ran it for the first time as an independent festival last year. That was a success, and now we're bigger, (slightly) better funded, and currently programming the lineup for this year.
Of course there's as many different processes as there are festivals, but in our case we're a curated festival with an application process. That means we program from the applications we receive, but we can (and do) also invite artists/performers that particularly interest us. Last year was our first year so we didn't have a call-out for applications (though we ended up with some anyway, somehow), but this year we wanted to open it up so we had a national call-out. We received something like 45 apps, and we've spent the last couple of weeks going through them.
Writing applications is a horrible time-consuming drag. Receiving them is also time-consuming, but on the whole, less horrible. It was especially interesting to see the trends and patterns emerge over large enough numbers. Shitloads of people wanted to run burlesque / cabaret events, and every one of them used the same tedious buzzwords: 'dark burlesque', 'dirty cabaret', 'edgy', 'gritty'... We knocked them all back, but we've gone out of our way to invite a caberet ensemble in Melbourne that features Steveo (a female Asian Steve Irwin impersonator) and a girl who re-enacts the Cronulla race riots through the medium of striptease.
Heaps of applications to do comedy rock shows: 'A Zombie Musical', 'Apocalypse: a Post-Apocalyptic Rock Opera with Zombies', 'The Glam Rock Bible' and so on. All of them look more or less like Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is not my thing, all of them feature zombies or the potential for zombies, which in 2010 is a pretty sad and tired gimmick, and all of them require amplification for a bunch of instruments, which is a big ask for a venue and tech crew as small as ours. We knocked back most of them, but there was one application for 'The Surgical Sideshow' featuring a bunch of people in charming skeleton costumes. Youtube didn't reveal much about them, but their CV shows they've been hitting the touring circuit pretty hard the last couple of years, so we can expect that they know their shit and are reasonably adaptable.
There were a good brace of insane high-art applications which we couldn't even understand: one guy wanted to examine racial/gender/cultural stereotypes by standing on a stepladder being photographed for 40 minutes, one trio wantd to present their play about 'feelings, radical feelings' which they talked about for 5 pages but never once mentioned how long it was, how many performers were in it or what happened on stage. There were a couple of groups that wanted to do 'live Chat Roulette' events - follow the zeitgeist, I guess. One group want to bring up a small caravan and do small performances out of that, another group want to set up an umbrella in the space and do short performances for 2-3 audiences at a time under that (yes to both of those). Another group of physical theatre performers wants to present a slow motion 40 minute food fight - I am on side of this.
We've also got a headphones theatre performance by a local group. This is a form of theatre in which the audience wear headphones and receive instructions / hear the play's soundtrack through an mp3 player. This genre has exploded in the last few years, with Rotozaza from the UK and Back to Back from Australia both presenting headphones shows at New York's Under the Radar festival in 2008. One of our sister festivals is also programming a headphones theatre group, so we'll probably aim to bring the artists together for a panel to discuss the practice in depth.
In most instances, both me and my co-director agree about who's in and who's out. In a couple of instances we've persuaded each other that a given application is nothing but trouble, and a couple of times we've relented and let each other have events we particularly like. I acquiesced and agreed to program the cabaret performer who does her entire show while jumping on a trampoline and hands around the audience props that she's made from her own hair. My co-director acquiesced and agreed to program the spoken word / noise and feedback duo.
Our headline acts are both from Melbourne: one is a variety night with an excellent rep that is coming up and doing an installment of their monthly event as part of the festival, the other is a faggot theatre duo with a back catalogue of some spectacular pulp, who are going to make a show from scratch over 24 hours at the festival. It will apparently be called 'The Rimming Club'.
We're going to hold two late night events: one will be a Black Mass (we wanted to purchase a Hell House and present that, but they're too fucking expensive) and one will be a SCARY SLEEPOVER in which participants will tell ghost stories with a torch under their chin. We're also going to organise a Careers Advisor, which will be the seediest looking punter we can find dressed in a Santa suit outside the guy's toilets yelling 'YOU'LL NEVER MAKE IT,' to aspiring theatre artists while they try to take a piss.
That's a little bit of the performance program. The other half is the critical discussion series of panels, forums, workshops and debates, which believe it or not is actually really fun to present. Basically we get to look at our industry and ask what we're curious about, and get a bunch of qualified people in to talk about them. Plus the panels program is where we attract the really big names in the industry - people from the Sydney Theatre Company, the big performing arts venues, the major arts publications, other festival directors, funding bodies... everyone wants an excuse to talk about their shit for an hour. |
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