photos are up

The Festival's photographer, Michael Barr, has put a selection of his photos from rehearsals and performances from this year's Festival on flikr for all to see.

seeing through the ages

also managed a visit to the 2008 British Glass Biennale, indisputably the highlight of the International Festival of Glass in Stourbridge. This was my first visit to the Ruskin Glass Centre, and, for that matter, Stourbridge (which is actually in Staffordshire). I had been completely oblivious to the town's glass making heritage.
I took away several interesting ideas, mainly to do with presentation, use of space and audience engagment. There were many pieces that I thought were excellent, both in terms of idea and of execution, although there were many that didn't float my boat. In a surreal double take, a piece by Robyn Smith made me suddely homesick, reminding me strongly of the curtains in my family dining room back in Brisbane.
The Festival finished two days ago, but the exhibition continues until 28 September, and is well worth a visit, even for glass sceptics.

back online

in the last few hours we've all come back online, and once again we have a fully functioning server and internet access. The festival remains in a strange no man's land of IT. We have IT support from Tamworth based MT Services but our internet access is still provided through the cathedral's system, with a wireless router in one of the spires. Somehow we manage to fall between the cracks every now and then, and the last seven days is a case in point. We have often considered becoming more technically autonomous, a consideration no doubt worth revisiting.
Thankfully our IT troubles had little impact on the already delayed literature brochure, which we managed to sign off last Wednesday despite pdfs being printed at home and files being chauffeured around the West Midlands. Brochures arrive on Monday, which gives us a four-week sale period like last year rather than the glorious seven-week one planned. For those unable to wait for Tuesday's post, a pdf is available here.

the edge of region

Thank you Birmingham Post for noticing the Abbotsholme Arts Society's new season in time for your regional autumn round up. Referred to (only by me) as Lichfield Festival's little sister, it is nice that our tiny, vital Abbotsholme season still manages to raise eyebrows. You need to read the whole article to find it, but we seem to have the most adjectives

Right on the edge of our region, the amazingly enterprising Abbotsholme Arts Society kicks off its 41st season of bringing world-class performers to Abbotsholme School near Rocester, deep in Staffordshire, with a visit from the Endellion String Quartet. The programme for this October 4 event includes Haydn, Britten, Janacek and Mozart. There follows a positive cornucopia of concerts in this heady series...

I very much like how 'amazingly enterprising', 'positive cornucopia' and 'heady series' sound.

I've been working from home for the last two days because our server in the Festival Office has gone down, taking email, web and every electronic file with it. We now know why we have been loyally backing up every day.

food for thought

seems the Hairy Bikers were so inspired by their sellout opening night audience at the recent Lichfield Festival that they've booked their local theatre in Barrow-in-Furness for some similar shows. It does appear though, that they thought they were opening the Lichfield Food Festival - which is still a gap in the market. I had had the idea for a long time of trying to introduce food events into the Lichfield Festival programme. The events we promoted at the 2006 and 2007 festivals that were tied to lunch at the Meynell Ingram Arms sold out instantly, so I was keen to do something a little bigger. If I had been able to confirm the Hairys earlier we might have been able to link in some actual cooking, but their filming schedule was only finalised in the weeks before our brochure went to print.
While I managed finally to book the Hairys after a few years of trying, I have quietly been trying to entice Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his team to Lichfield since before the 2005 festival. The plan was (and I guess still is) to invite HFW to the Lichfield Farmers Market, which traditionally coincides with the first day of the Festival, have him do some kind of event at the Garrick on that Thursday, on the Friday do something at a venue with a kitchen exclusively with Staffordshire produce, then on the Saturday have a stall at the Market in the cathedral close. This would be a neat and high profile way to draw attention to all the great produce from Staffordshire and the wider region, while acknowledging Lichfield's market heritage. That the Hairy's sold out so quickly shows that the idea remains strong.
Of course A Taste of Staffordshire has been promoting excellence in food throughout the region for years, especially through its annual and imminent good food awards. There is also the fabulous Stone Food Festival which starts in just over a month's time on 3 October. The Hairys new series, The Hairy Bakers, started last night.

fabric of myth

finally managed a visit to Compton Verney's latest exhibition the other day, and found myself blown away by The Fabric of Myth. I knew in advance that it had a large Henry Moore, and pieces by Bourgeois, Beuys and Morris, but I hadn't really paid enough attention to the pre-publicity so did not arrive prepared for the depth of approach and cohesively explained mythology surrounding weaving and fabric in art. I know the clue was in the title, but my mind has been on other things I guess.
Revelations for me included Ray Materson's miniatures, the somehow maniacally frenzied work of Arthur Bispo Do Rosario, the calming Divers from Heaven by Leonid Tishkov (which reminded me of Ian Davenport's poured lines) and Tilleke Schwarz's extraordinary embroidery - a kind of contemporary sampler. The exhibition continues until 7 September. I'd strongly recommend it.

mr simcock again again

as detailed in a previous post, Gwilym Simcock's Prom debut took place on Saturday (live radio, live tv, world premiere of a major commission and solo piano - not bad for a debut and certainly a BBC pound of flesh). Couldn't make it down to London to see it but managed to watch the whole thing on tv. Really nice programming, with works by Gershwin, Berstein, Stravinsky, Simcock and the outstanding Jason Yarde (another world premiere). I thought Gwil's Progressions was a brilliantly orchestrated and approachable work despite the density of writing, and the orchestra had obviously enjoyed working with him a lot. The piece will no doubt have a long and well deserved life.
The concert will be available on BBCi Player video here, but is already available for one week in first half and second half. I hope someone manages to get it Gwil's piece on youtube.
The other highlight for me was hearing Bernstein's Prelude, Fugue and Riffs again, with my only (slight) disappointment being that the Proms did not use this as an opportunity to showcase a younger clarinettist instead of the obviously brilliant Michael Collins.
Watching the Proms live performer interviews immediately before and after being on stage was great, especially when we are seeing the same with athlete interviews from the Olympics. I know not everyone can do it, but I thought Jason Yarde, Gwil and Charles Hazelwood were articulate, measured and completely unfazed. There must be a way of somehow bringing this to the live experience in a way other than pre-concert talks and talking to the audience from an onstage microphone, especially during platform changes that eat up so much time.

brochure landing

the brochure for the 41st Abbotsholme Arts Society season has finally landed about 5 weeks later than originally planned. They go out in today's post and the website goes live tonight, but we've missed all the Lichfield Festival audiences which will no doubt slow bookings down.
Season kicks off with the Endellion String Quartet performing Haydn, Britten, Janáček, Mozart on 4 October. Other artists are visiting the Staffordshire/Derbyshire border from Australia, Germany, Bengal, Bulgaria, Austria and Israel, as well as from throughout the UK, so little Abbotsholme continues to punch above its weight. I guess it also gives me something to do in my eleven-month holiday from the Lichfield Festival!

cobalt blue handshake

last night I went to the inaugural Arthur Boyd Lecture presented by Barry Humphries at Australia House in London. This is a new event on the London cultural scene, and one intended to provoke further debate about the changing role and impact Australia arts and culture has on the UK, and to some extent vice versa. Barry was really great actually, extremely articulate and very funny, and talked about his close friendship with Boyd both in Melbourne and London from the 1950s on. Rather touchingly, the final time they saw each other and for their final handshake, Boyd's hands were covered in cobalt blue paint having just started a canvas to cap off an interview with Barry for an ABC documentary.
While to my mind the lecture did not really provoke much discussion about the impact of Australian arts on the UK, one thing that I did take away is how perceptions of gaining international experience away from Australia continue to change. Barry reminded everybody that his generation called Britain home, so visiting or emigrating was perfectly natural. The generations that followed were more sceptical of people who left Australia to live and work 'overseas' - that big nebulous part of the world defined as 'not Australia'. My feeling is that international experience is almost expected these days, although I have yet to experience The Return. But in a room full of rising ends-of-sentences and thoroughbred accents, and with so many Australians now a formative part of the UK arts scene (a topic that has been written about vehemently and extensively by the British press), there remains a large part of me that wonders whether overseas experience is all a bit of a one way ticket.

not here, but there and everywhere

slow news day I'm afraid, so I thought I'd reproduce something I wrote for this year's Festival Programme.

Festival director Richard Hawley looks ahead to a year without a Cathedral

Is a festival defined by the spaces it uses? Can a festival born out of a building exist if that building is not available? Can a festival, by nature one thing, be nurtured into something more?

Lichfield Festival has a long history of using non-traditional spaces. Over the next ten days we will present work in over 14 spaces, but only two of them – the Lichfield Garrick Theatre and the Garrick Studio - are purpose-built venues. The rest include open air spaces, hotel ballrooms, churches, town halls, and, most significantly, Lichfield Cathedral and its glorious Lady Chapel.

For decades the Lichfield Festival has had Lichfield Cathedral at its heart, and despite gently repositioning the Festival since 2003 to embrace the award-winning Lichfield Garrick Theatre and its year-round season, the festival retains a vital connection to the cathedral and its community. It has for many years been a happy symbiosis. We have a different relationship to our city’s cathedral than, for instance, the Salisbury, Norfolk & Norwich, and City of London Festivals at one end, and the Three Choirs Festival at the other. It is our largest indoor space, over 6,500 people enjoy events there every Festival, it currently gives us our best chance to exhibit Visual Art, and the Festival Office still looks out over the West Front – arguably the best view in Lichfield.

Lichfield Cathedral is renowned for its excellent acoustic, its accessibility and welcome. When the Festival started in 1982 it was sought out by the best national and international orchestras as the place to perform (remember these were the days before Birmingham’s Symphony Hall). While our connection to the cathedral remains significant, we have believed for years that the future success of the Lichfield Festival lies in it being perceived and enjoyed as Lichfield’s Festival rather than one linked exclusively to a venue. The Festival opening the Lichfield Garrick in 2003 was one step in this direction. Changing our business name from Lichfield Cathedral Arts to Lichfield Festival in 2005 was another.

Therefore, when we were told that the Cathedral’s ’once-in-a-century’ Lichfield InSpires project to conserve and restore the cathedral would mean that the Festival will not be able to use it at all in 2010 due to ongoing internal and external restoration work, it was not cause for alarm, but something which was to be viewed as an incredible and ‘unthought-of’ opportunity. An opportunity to shake things up a bit; an opportunity to be more accessible to even more people who live and work in Lichfield; an opportunity to explore the city and district and what it has to offer; and an opportunity to devise a new model that, when we return to the cathedral in 2011, ensures Lichfield Festival for generations to come.

It is also an opportunity for the Festival to reinvigorate our relationship with this significant, historical and beautiful building, its wider community and its projected 200,000 future visitors a year.

That said, life without a cathedral has never been a consideration for a festival born out of one. While I truly welcome Lichfield InSpires and its vision, and the prospect of an internationally significant permanent display in the Chapter House of the cathedral’s collection of early English Bibles alongside the St Chad Gospels; and while I understand the importance of reinstating the Shrine of St Chad to the Lady Chapel, I can’t help but lament the potential loss of these wonderful spaces for Festival events and audiences for the future. I have had some of my most significant Festival experiences in the Lady Chapel.

To some extent a similar issue was faced by the 2001 and 2002 Festivals while the Civic Hall transformed into the Lichfield Garrick in the heart of the city. Those Festivals increased activity in country churches, as well as using venues like the National Memorial Arboretum, Sutton Coldfield Town Hall, and Burton Town Hall.

While marking ten years of the Staffordshire Country Church concerts last year, plans were already afoot to rejuvenate that series into what is now FEAST: Festival Events Around Staffordshire. FEAST’s premise was to use non-traditional venues like village halls and rural pockets alongside the country churches, but also to develop the Festival’s offering outside of Lichfield District.

This year we visit two villages to which the Festival has never been – Dunstall and Barlaston - in addition to returning to Brewood, Swinfen, Hoar Cross and Clifton Campville. It was already intended that this programming thread would become increase during the Festival, potentially spread to other times of the year and also generate local interest through education and outreach work.

Festival audiences will start to see some changes in venues, how performances are presented, and a wider cultural offering, most likely commencing in 2009 in readiness for the following year. We’ll definitely be expanding our FEAST events. I would love the opportunity to open it out to Lichfield’s nooks and crannies – from aircraft hangers to front living rooms, from industrial spaces and quarries to empty offices in the city centre.

I would like to invite you, our audience, to send ideas for potential performance spaces – both here in Lichfield and for our FEAST events – where we could possibly visit over coming years. They will need to be venues that we have not previously used, and can range from really small to really big. This is your opportunity to be involved in the future of the Lichfield Festival, and I look forward to hearing from you.
© Richard Hawley

quiet recognition at last

Finally, after seeing article after article come out in the UK regarding Valery Gergiev, Lichfield Festival has finally had some public acknowledgement for giving him his UK debut in 1987. While this appeared in last Saturday's The Knowledge, the hard copy was dropped through the Festival Office earlier today. Our scanner couldn't cope with the whole article, but we're right there at the start of the graph.

'A low-key British debut at the Lichfield Festival gets a thumbs-up from The Times: Gergiev is "magnificently in control" in a programme of typically Russian highlights, the overture to Ruslan and Ludmila and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony'