Festivals

Imagine it’s Friday night. You’re exploring your options. Pub… click… film… click… club… click …show …click. You can’t decide. Maybe you opt for an evening in front of the telly with a takeaway…click. Be honest, on how many Friday nights do you do something you’ve never done before?...risk being exhilarated or bored to within an inch of your life?…experience something you might never again before you die? Now imagine another Friday night. This time you’re in a strange city and your senses are alive to difference all around you. You’re at a festival. The streets and parks and buildings are bursting with light, colour, aroma and live music. What do you choose to do? Dive in and take a risk? Or run home and switch on your computer?

When it comes to festivals, there's something in our bones that encourages us to take risks, to be more adventurous and to be playful. The diversity of the festival experience is staggering, matching the depth and breadth of human imagination. You could be cramming in eight shows a day at the Edinburgh Fringe, rolling down a Gloucestershire hill impersonating a piece of cheese or at Glastonbury with one hundred and fifty thousand other people up to your knees in mud. You could be dodging splashes of hot tar in Ottery St. Mary on bonfire night or coming over all literary at Hay-on-Wye. Just a boat journey away you could be chased through the streets of Pamplona by a bull, covered in tomatoes in Valencia or seeing shows from every corner of the globe in Avignon.

Even a single festival creates a rich variety of experience for audiences. Take last Friday. It was a warm evening at Latitude: one of the UK’s most exciting new arts festivals. Grace Jones was playing on the main stage. In a tiny cabaret tent two performers from Uninvited Guests played love dedications for audience members in a tribute to the thing that makes the world go round. A few minutes walk away another tent was crammed with hundreds of people poised in silence hanging on every word of poet Polar Bear. At a bar created entirely from scrap wood there were people discussing the visit of climate minister Ed Milliband and the forthcoming Copenhagen summit. Everywhere people were talking, eating and dancing to live music. Despite the presence of the big names from the music industry, our hunger for the unknown, the unexpected and left field is insatiable. We crave things we didn’t know we wanted: rich and diverse cultural experiences underscored by genuine ambition.

Not everything comes with a cast-iron guarantee of quality. At the Edinburgh Fringe for example, much of the work feels either desperate or derivative. Or both! Some shows are half-baked ideas, others misjudged. But sometimes you will find a gem in the most unexpected of places. An impromptu performance in the queue at the box office, a fifteen minute work-in-progress showing in the bar or a mini opera when maybe you thought you didn’t even like opera.

At Battersea Arts Centre we talk a lot about the festival experience. Not just as part of the festivals we programme each year, but as a central component of any visit to our Town Hall home. We aim to engender audiences every evening with the same desire to take risks, to embark on adventures and encounter the unexpected. We are on a journey towards creating a programme that offers audiences a festival experience every night across our 70-room home. We are seeking the essence of those fantastic festival experiences with evenings chock-full of new ideas, experiments and unexpected journeys. Next Friday, move beyond the click, find a festival experience, hang out and see what happens. If you don’t find something you’re looking for, then come and talk to us about your ideas for a life-changing festival experience in Battersea.

David Jubb and David Micklem (Joint Artistic Directors)