THE FESTIVAL QUARTERLY Aleš Šteger Ayoko Mensah Alicja Gescinska Tomáš Sedláček Melanie Burge Simon Mundy 3 Aleš Šteger How to live after the end of reflection THE FESTIVAL QUARTERLY 6 Ayoko Mensah Eye-to-Eye... ...with those that inform, influence or inspire festival makers Afropolitan festivals: a challenge and making: the artist, the economist, the philosopher, the urban planner, the academic, the politician. The European Festivals Association’s (EFA) ‘The Festival Quarterly’ Eye-to-Eye assembles a variety of voices that speak Alicja Gescinska 9 about our society, the state of the arts and reasons why the On Music, Morality and Krzysztof Penderecki arts exist, concepts, and moments in contemporary life. It includes articles we commission and material we ask editors to provide. Eye-to-Eye offers a mosaic of reflections, opinion pieces, personal statements, seemingly unrelated yet 13 Tomáš Sedláček fitting with each other. It reflects EFA’s journey to broadenour Advantages of disadvantages, or don’t let conversations and dig into the habitat of festivals, taking us the quarantine slip through your fingers well beyond the process of festival making. Today we are sharing with you the very first issue: The Festival Quarterly’s Summer 2020 edition. We intend to publish 16 Melanie Burge Eye-to-Eye articles, film abstracts and material every 3 months. The pandemic’s immediate impact on We will develop this project with the experience of each performing arts in Australia edition: Eye-to-Eye will be an evolving project, taking into consideration the suggestions we will receive from festivals and our stakeholders community. Be part of it. 19 Simon Mundy Mediterranean Blues Kathrin Deventer EFA Secretary General 3 Aleš Šteger How to live after the end of reflection Mirror reflections in an apartment window theatre When I find myself at my little desk That must have been in the late Aleš Šteger is a poet and prose looking through the window, I am sixties, early seventies I thought, writer, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. directly facing the gigantic glass and answered without guessing, His work has been widely translated façade of a hotel, near the old town “he came, you must mean Pres- and acclaimed around the world, of Ljubljana. The street is narrow ident Tito.” “No,” said the former covering various fields of artistic and the hotel blocks any view. It is owner, “I mean Gagarin, the first man expression including visual arts, a huge glass wall, a gold-rimmed in Space.” I have never checked music and film. Aleš Šteger is square theatre box. Normally, I if this story is true and if Gagarin programme director of Beletrina witness here how lights are turned really stayed in the hotel across the on and off and how little stage street, nor if he was responsible Publishing house in Ljubljana and curtains are moved aside and the for paving the surrounding streets, founder of the Versopolis European life of strangers gives wanted or but the idea that, in communist network of international poetry involuntary guest performances. times, a short visit by only one festivals. person could change the whole When my wife and I visited the neighbourhood is both fascinating apartment ten years ago, the house- and repulsive. keeper looked with melancholy at the street from that same window. For the first few years after we Seventy years ago she was born had moved into the apartment, the in this very room. In pensive mood hotel was often empty, run down she looked outside and said, “after as it was. After 2008, Slovenia they built this giant thing, everything fell into a long recession, which around it was neglected. There was was clearly evident in the rarity of no side-walk and the street was hotel guests. But then came – no unpaved. But then he came and again not Tito, neither Gagarin nor overnight everything was pepped a contemporary dictator, sheik or up and taken care of.” president elected for life. It wasn’t a single person but a mass of 4 Aleš Šteger unnamed Asian tourists, dragged to this place by the tour operator for watching TV, I find myself once more watching the increasingly clear one night. To this place. To the always popular insider tip on their way reflection of my own room in the silent glass façade of the hotel. from Venice to Dubrovnik. Maybe I had to wait ten years for this moment where no distraction or Meanwhile the sleepy parking lot in front of the hotel was now overloaded excuse holds me from watching myself, us, the natives caught in our with tour buses. We had to close and curtain our window because of the apartments, waiting for life to continue after the end of reflection. It is noise, exhaust gases, the eager looking and picture-making faces seeing not easy to withstand our own view of ourselves and our own misery. us as we are, wanting to capture a few souvenirs in the form of glimpses It is much more difficult than we initially imagined. It is not easy not to into the real, true and very private spectacle of the native species, living look away, not to flee to a computer screen or glass of whisky or wine. in the opposite window theatre, who are also becoming increasingly rare in Ljubljana. I watch and see, and I see how and what I am watching, and I feel awe, fear and gratitude; that during a pandemic, there can be a It was again a time when everything had to be made more beautiful and feeling of gratitude for everything, really everything that happens and more pleasing to the gawping industry. The road between us and the may happen to one – which might sound odd given the many victims hotel had been torn open, and was dug for Roman tombs. A few stones and hardships. At the same time however, this contradictory feeling of and fibulae were found after which new larger sewer drain pipes were gratitude (the brother of fear?) in these conditions is the only basis on placed and everything was poured back in as quickly as possible. At the which I, sitting behind my small desk, am able to look into civilisation same time, the inside of the hotel had been renovated and a café with in the midst of deserted streets and the beautifully polished ruins of terrace was built right across the street. As a result, also with closed tomorrow and how something like a very vague idea can be a meditation windows, one could enjoy the songs of Chinese, Irish or Italian drunks. on the coming day. The café boomed for several years. Afterwards it became suddenly way more calm. Text published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 2020. I had an espresso in the hotel café. The lonely receptionist with whom I chitchatted said: we can deal with Chinese people staying away, but when Italian guests leave us, we are lost. For the last two weeks the hotel has been officially dead. I cannot help watching the corpse again and again every day. It didn’t take long to realise that the death of the hotel made the glass façade come to life. Instead of being a bored voyeur of an unknown visitor pulling the curtains aside, daydreaming through the window, putting on make-up, fighting, taking off or putting on clothes, or simply FESTIVAL LIFE Soprano Mari Eriksmoen on stage in the 2019 Opening Performance: Waiting by Calixto Bieito & Karl Ove Knausgård. The 2019 Bergen International Festival opened with the world premiere of a symphonic Passion to the music of Edvard Grieg. Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård created a modern Solveig in a poetic novella, and this formed a backdrop for the performance. Waiting is an international co-production and went on to tour the Nordic countries and Europe. © Thor Brødreskift 6 Ayoko Mensah Afropolitan festivals: a challenge Not many European art centres live in Europe, 500,000 of whom are Ayoko Mensah is a cultural expert of international stature organise in Belgium. Many of these Afropeans and artistic programmer. Since 2016, annual multidisciplinary events either have dual citizenship, or have she has been working for the Centre dedicated to the African and become citizens of their adoptive for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels. Afro-descendant art scene. In the country while fostering strong ties She is the curator of the Afropolitan past ten years or so, an increasing with their native country. number of events focused on Festival at BOZAR. Of Togolese African artists have taken place This duality is one of the character- heritage, born in France in 1968, in Europe but these are mostly istics of Afropolitanism, a concept Mensah graduated in cultural limited to a specific artist, art defined by political theorist Achille management and journalism in form, or country, or are then larger, Mbembe: “Today, many Africans live © Caroline Lessire France. She has worked as an expert but one-off, events. Sustained, outside Africa. Others have decided for several international organisations cross-disciplinary platforms in of their own accord to live on the (including UNESCO, the European major cultural institutions are still continent but not necessarily in their Commission and the Africa Caribbean the exception. countries of birth. More so, many of them have had the opportunity Pacific Group). Mensah has also The African and Afro-European1 art to experience several worlds and, written more than a hundred articles scenes are increasingly ‘in vogue’, in fact, have not stopped coming and co-authored several books. particularly in Europe, due to their and going, developing an invaluable level of excellence, their flourishing wealth of perception and sensitivity creativity, and a sense of urgency in the course of these movements.