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PLAYING BALL WITH ART

By Festival Director Ismail Mahomed

Directing an arts festival offers many joys and the pains that come with the
glitz and the glamour of nursing the ambitions of directors, designers
writers, actors and a whole team of backstage people who passionately work
to ensure that the curtains go up and that there are bums on seats.

There is an enormous feeling of euphoria when months of interrogating and
planning that goes into making a festival begin to fall into place and when
audiences begin to buy their tickets. This however does not mean that
unsuspecting events will not spring up.

Managing the arts includes immersing oneself in the kind of conversation
which interrogates those who define what is art, who makes art, how art gets
made, who has access to it, who funds it and just how it ends up being
presented to an audience. A significant responsibility also comes with
provoking and contesting with the minds of those artists who try to define
how audiences should engage with their art.

It is particularly for this reason that festivals thrive when they become
more than just trying to be hubs for entertainment. Festivals offer us the
opportunity to be entertained but they also offer us a greater opportunity
to find ourselves at the source of strange encounters which raise many
questions that are related to our being, our societies, our politics and to
our identities which we try to constantly re-define and re-align.

The more we try to define who we are, the more likely we are to fall into
the trap of asking the question, "Eish! Is that art?"

Interestingly, the only festivals that die a lonely death are the festivals
that attempt to answer that question. Festivals that allow its spectators to
debate that question are the festivals that make progress. Festivals that
create new curiosities are the festivals that find newer audiences.

When festivals stop pricking our curiosities, they become boring. When
festivals stop challenging us, they becoming irrelevant. When festivals stop
providing us with unknown encounters, they fall off our consciousness.

Successful festivals have at the core of their programming a rich
celebration of cultural expression that defines us as a society. But in
order to survive festivals must go beyond trying to be platforms for only
celebration. Festivals thrive when they are prepared to have a dangerous
edge. Work presented at a festival doesn't always have to be beautiful. Real
art stands shoulders above the rest because it doesn't owe a debt that
forces it to be politically correct or to be socially correct.

Art become real at a festival when it engages us intellectually. It has to
stir up our emotions. It must enlighten us. It must confuse us. It must
re-position us so that we are not only spectators. It must give us the
courage to become active as participants, supporters and opponents in a
dialogue with the artists who have the courage to put their art before us.

The opening performance of Football Football at the Alec Mullins Hall did
just that. It provoked a response from an audience that walked out but it
also held the attention of an audience that stayed till the final end to
reward the company with a rousing applause. Does that mean that one group
was right and the other was wrong? Does it mean that the group that makes
the louder noise gets to either promote or censor the production? Festivals
certainly don't exist because artistic expression needs to be identified so
that it can be approved or be disapproved.

Festivals exist so that artists can take ownership of their creativity while
the audience paints a canvass of expression in the way they respond to the
art which they either embrace or walk-away from. That freedom doesn't reduce
the integrity of the artist and neither does it reduce the integrity of the
audience.

Festival managements are the intermediaries who must navigate in the freedom
of those spaces by protecting and promoting the rights of both the artist
and that of the audience. When artists claim that their work reflects just
how violent how society is, as managements we don't have the right to take
away their paintbrushes so that their pictures become sanitized. As
managements we do however have the responsibility to inform our audiences
about matters that they consider when they make their choices about the art
to which they wish to be exposed.

Arts festivals are like bottles of champagne. The cork can either be popped
open and the champagne be spilt or the cork can be popped and the bubbly can
be consumed. The fact that the bottle gets corked open doesn't mean that we
all have to raise our glasses and drink the champagne. Some amongst us do
have the right to wave the glass past. The teachers who walked their
children out of the performance did so with conviction because they believed
that their children were too young to drink from the bottle that was opened.
They acted responsibly! It's exactly what I would have expected the teachers
to do if they were the custodians of my children.

Artists too must behave like good champagne. Artists shouldn't blow out
extra fizz because they get waved past. Instead, artists should work harder
at growing in vintage so that the champagne connoisseur comes closer to take
a second look at the label. Arts managements after all are like the bottles
that preserve the bubbly and help it to grow in vintage. Responsible and
good art must be like good champagne. It does not have too fall too easily
into the hands of the unsuspecting child.

By exercising an "Adults Only" restriction on Football Football, we are
committed to ensure a responsible engagement with the arts that protects the
rights and the responsibilities of both our artists and our audiences. By
not slapping such an age restriction on the production in the first place,
we erred. By rectifying our error, we attempt to make amends to the
audiences whom we've offended. By ensuring that the production is presented
to a correctly targeted adults audience we affirm our commitment to the
artists whose creativity we have undertaken to promote.