Festival Directors

I ran into the director of a major contemporary music festival.

A major one.

The kind with funding streams.

And sub-streams.

And little tributaries of subsidy flowing quietly into the pockets

of people who know where the tributaries are.

He said

almost absent-mindedly, as if remarking on cloud cover

that no one over fifty should be allowed to vote.

Only the young.

Only the hopeful.

Only the ones not yet aware

that hope is a muscle that fatigues

if you keep asking it to lift bureaucracies.

I nodded.

Of course I nodded.

Nodded like the plastic saint

on the dashboard of a taxi that never stops braking.

And inside, somewhere under the nodding

I thought...

Yes… and maybe start with yourself.

Maybe begin the cull at the top table of the donor reception.

Work down.

But I didn’t say it.

Because there are rules.

Unspoken rules.

Rules about who gets to say things

and who gets to hear them

and who gets to pretend that hearing is the same as listening.

Festival directors stay too long.

That’s all.

That’s the sentence.

They stay.

They bed in.

Twenty years.

Twenty-two if there’s a renovation.

Twenty-four if someone writes a strategic report no one reads.

Five years would be plenty.

Five years is an age in artistic time.

Five years and then

the handover.

The cleansing fire.

The resetting of the clocks.

But that’s not what happens.

The festivals repeat.

The seasons rotate.

The same three surnames reappear in different fonts.

The same belovéds

belovéd by whom?

For what?

We’re never told

float serenely from programme note to programme note

as if carried by a gentle thermodynamic principle

that applies only to them.

Meanwhile, most musicians, most

hover.

They hover like unresolved chords.

They hover at the edges of glass foyers

that reflect them

but do not admit them.

The lost ones

the ones still writing at kitchen tables

in the quiet disappointment hours

they watch the festivals drift past

like weather fronts.

Not hostile

Just irrelevant.

A light rain of opportunity

that somehow always falls

one postcode away.

And I think

dangerous thought

if I were running a festival,

a real one,

a civic one,

a humane, porous, electric one

I’d begin by dismantling the frame itself.

Not the programme

the assumption of the programme.

The idea that a festival is a sequence

rather than a system.

A calendar

rather than a commons.

A schedule

rather than a structure for people

to meet,

to collide,

to be altered.

A festival you find yourself in

before you realise you’ve arrived.

Where nobody is included

because inclusion isn’t a category 

it’s just what happens

when the centre stops pretending to be the centre

and the edges stop apologising for being edges.

But instead

year after year

the big festivals sit there

like unclaimed potential.

Vast.

Quiet.

Wasted.

Machines built to make meaning

that somehow

manufacture

nothing.