The city through spectacles

David Binder

Performance

A new kind of festival is weaving its way through the world’s great cities, and it’s not so much theatre as a way of life, says producer David Binder

Sydney. I had been waiting my whole life to get to Sydney.

It was January 2011. I got to my hotel, checked in, and there in the lobby was the brochure for the Sydney Festival. I thumbed through it, and came across a show called Minto: Live .

It read: “The suburban streets of Minto become the stage for new and original performances created by critically acclaimed Australian and international artists in collaboration with Minto residents.”

What was this place called Minto? Sydney, as I would learn, is a city of suburbs, and Minto lies south-west, about an hour away.

I was intrigued. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for my first day down under. The Opera House or Bondi Beach maybe… but Minto? But I’m a theatre producer, and the lure of an innovative site-specific project was more than I could resist. So off I went, into the Friday afternoon traffic.

I will never forget the performance I saw when I finally arrived. The audience walked around the neighborhood, from house to house. The performers – the local residents – came out of their houses and performed autobiographical dances on their front lawns. The show was a collaboration with the UK-based performance company Lone Twin , which had spent a few weeks working with the community. An Australian–Indian girl came out and began dancing on her front lawn. Her father peered out of the window to see what the noise was about. He and the rest of her family soon joined her on their driveway for an exuberant dance.

As I made my way through the neighbourhood, I was amazed and moved by the sense of ownership the whole community clearly felt over the event. Minto: Live brought local and international artists into dialogue with Sydneysiders, and celebrated the diversity of Sydney on its own terms.

The Sydney Festival, which produced Minto: Live , represents a new kind of 21st-century arts festival. These festivals transform cities and communities. To appreciate what’s new and timely about arts festivals like Sydney’s, it helps to see where they came from.

The modern arts festival grew out of the rubble of the second world war. Civic leaders created annual events to celebrate culture as the highest expression of the human spirit. The Edinburgh and Avignon festivals were born in 1947; hundreds more followed in their wake. The work they curated was knowingly and unapologetically “high art”. Stars emerged who created work for this circuit: Pina Bausch, Laurie Anderson, Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris and Robert Lepage, to name a few. There were landmark shows, such as Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata and Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach .

But as decades passed, this first-wave generation of modern arts festivals became the establishment. The exclusivity they represented no longer mapped onto the reality of globalised existence, as flows of culture and capital accelerated, and the internet and other electronic media brought people together. While older festivals continue to thrive, a new kind of festival has emerged. Such festivals, thriving from Perth to Norwich to Rio, are characterised by a spirit of radical openness.

As in Minto, they create a dialogue between the local and the global. They encourage audiences to be partners, players and protagonists, rather than passive spectators. And they are curated on the principle that the imagination cannot be contained in traditional buildings: the work is often site-specific and outdoors. These festivals truly are a celebration of a place and time that could only exist in that place, at that time.

The new festival expects the audience to play an essential role in shaping the performance. The work of the Argentinian company De La Guarda, which I’ve produced in New York, feels like a South American rave at 4am, where just about anything could happen. The cast run through the audience and straight up walls; they fly through a rainstorm above us, and crash through the ceiling into our midst. In British theatre company Punchdrunk’s shows , such as Sleep No More and Faust , they take over disused buildings and spends months meticulously designing each room. Each audience member is given a mask and is left to wander and explore. The whole building becomes a set on which several stories play out simultaneously.

While De La Guarda and Punchdrunk put us at the centre of the action, the German performance company Rimini Protokoll takes the idea of participation to a whole new level. Their series of shows, which includes 100 Percent Berlin , 100 Percent Melbourne , and 100 Percent Vancouver , are literally reflective of society. Through a careful process that begins months before, one hundred people are chosen to mirror an exact cross section of the city in terms of race, gender and class. Statistics are literally brought to life. The hundred people offer bits of stories about themselves and their lives, and the whole show becomes a snapshot of that city at that particular moment. It’s surprising and beautiful and moving.

The new festival isn’t restricted to standard venues. Theatre and performance can happen anywhere – in a schoolroom, a department store window, or an airport. Artists are explorers. Who better to show us the city and make us see the landscape anew? Artists can take us to far-flung parts of the city we’ve never investigated, or into a building around the corner that we’d never previously noticed. And artists can help us to see people that we might otherwise overlook.

Back to Back is an Australian company of people with intellectual disabilities. I saw their extraordinary show Small Metal Objects at the Staten Island Ferry terminal in New York – at rush hour. The audience members were seated on one side of the terminal and were given headsets. We could hear the actors’ voices, but it took us a while to locate them among the commuters. They were right there in front of us, but we might otherwise never have seen them. Back to Back uses site-specific performance to help us think about who and what we edit out of our daily lives.

The dialogue between the local and the global; audiences as participants; site-specific and outdoor venues: all of these characteristics come into play in the work of the French company Royal de Luxe , whose work epitomises the new festival’s spirit of radical openness. Royal de Luxe’s twelve-metre-high puppets arrive into a community and live there for a few days. The spectacles they produce are the most genuinely community-oriented and joy-filled work I’ve ever seen. Festivals from Berlin to Santiago have presented them.

In their show The Sultan’s Elephant , Royal de Luxe, with Artichoke Productions, brought central London to a standstill with the story of a little girl and her friend, a time-travelling elephant. For a few days, they transformed a massive city into a community where endless possibility reigned. The Guardian ’s theatre critic Lyn Gardner wrote: “If art is about transformations, there is no more transforming experience… What The Sultan’s Elephant represents is nothing less than an artistic occupation of the city and a reclamation of the streets for the people.”

We could talk about the huge economic impact festivals have on their cities. But frankly, for me, the numbers are the least interesting part of the story. A festival can bring a community into a new awareness of itself. It lets it express itself more vibrantly. So a festival’s impact reaches far beyond its actual time span. Festivals promote diversity. They set the neighbours talking. They create opportunities for civic pride, improve psychological well-being, and increase creativity. They make cities more liveable.

When The Sultan’s Elephant appeared , nine months after the London bombings of 7 July 2005, a man from Manchester wrote: “For the first time since the London bombs, my daughter rang back home with that sparkle in her voice. She’d gathered with others to watch The Sultan’s Elephant and it just made the difference.”

As Gardner argued, a truly great festival “can show us a map of the world, a map of our city, and a map of ourselves.” But there is no fixed model: what is thrilling about the emergence of the new festivals is how fully they capture the complexity and excitement of the way we live today.

Adapted from a speech delivered in Edinburgh at TED Global 2012.