Preserving a special sense of meaning is pivotal for Jane Moss. “There are lots of festivals around. You need to stay focused on a festival that has meaning of some sort.” She has found that the most successful performing arts events “always have enormous passion attached. For a festival, you need somebody who is an advocate and who is passionate about what they are presenting. Audiences do not want programming based on a focus group. They tend to respond to vision. If you start with the premise: ‘We want an audience of XX and therefore will do YY, because we think we know what they will like’, it almost never works. The audience will respond to a director who has passion.”
Moss’ other key piece of advice: “You have to keep it new all the time. The minute it becomes a formula, you will get into trouble. Art truly is a life force, and you have to keep nourishing it. Art can take over in a way few things can, opening up different dimensions of yourself.”
Fergus Linehan recommends cultivating “at least one area of absolute expertise. If you have within one genre a more complete understanding, you can make sense of everything else and broaden out from that. People who try to be complete generalists from the start run into trouble. At a festival, you constantly put yourself in the discomfort of those areas which you don’t know so well. This helps you to be prepared for that.”
For Ruth Mackenzie, the cardinal advice for a festival director is clear: “You have to listen: to your audience, to your staff, to everyone involved. You have to trust your own instincts. And you have to trust the artists. If you do trust them, you may get a bad piece of art, but you will never get a good one if you do not trust the artists. Above all you have to defend the freedom of the arts and the freedom of the audience to enjoy experimentation. It sounds straightforward, but none of that is easy. On the practical level, I have to say that everything is my fault when something goes wrong. And offer to buy everyone drinks at the end of it all!”
Moss’ other key piece of advice: “You have to keep it new all the time. The minute it becomes a formula, you will get into trouble. Art truly is a life force, and you have to keep nourishing it. Art can take over in a way few things can, opening up different dimensions of yourself.”
Fergus Linehan recommends cultivating “at least one area of absolute expertise. If you have within one genre a more complete understanding, you can make sense of everything else and broaden out from that. People who try to be complete generalists from the start run into trouble. At a festival, you constantly put yourself in the discomfort of those areas which you don’t know so well. This helps you to be prepared for that.”
For Ruth Mackenzie, the cardinal advice for a festival director is clear: “You have to listen: to your audience, to your staff, to everyone involved. You have to trust your own instincts. And you have to trust the artists. If you do trust them, you may get a bad piece of art, but you will never get a good one if you do not trust the artists. Above all you have to defend the freedom of the arts and the freedom of the audience to enjoy experimentation. It sounds straightforward, but none of that is easy. On the practical level, I have to say that everything is my fault when something goes wrong. And offer to buy everyone drinks at the end of it all!”
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий