Festival Makers conference 2023
Rapt attention from the delegates at the final session of the 2023 Festival Makers conference in University of Galway
As part of my work with as Festival Advisor to the Arts Council (2016-2022), I helped to organise Change Makers, the first conference gathering of Arts Council funded festivals, which took place in University of Limerick on 14th Feb 2020. The event was a great success with over 200 festival makers packed into the Irish World Academy of Music & Dance lecture hall enthusing about their upcoming festivals, and enjoying the company of others involved in the same activity in different communities around the country. Exactly one month later, on March 14th, the first lockdown to stem the spread of Covid-19 came into force, causing festivals across the country to cancel or migrate their programming online.
When my contract as Festival Advisor finished in August 2022, Ireland was not long out of the final lockdown and festivals were beginning to get back on track. Needless to say the community of festival makers had not met in person since 2020, and I was delighted when the Arts Council’s Head of Festivals Karl Wallace, with whom I had worked closely over the preceding six years, invited me to join the curatorial team for the Festival Makers Conference, which was scheduled for May 2023.
Reflecting back on the preparation and delivery of the two conferences a number of things stand out. Firstly, the importance of the finding a theme to guide the curation. For the 2020 conference, the curatorial team consisted of Karl, myself and Dr Niamh NicGhabhann, representing University of Limerick. As this was to be the first time the festival community would be coming together, we spent many months discussing what it was that they shared. While recognising that these organisations differed greatly in size, setting and artfrom focus, we concluded they were united in their capacity to effect change. This led to us deciding on the theme for the 2020 conference of “[t]he transformative power of festivals”. Also emerging from these curatorial discussions was the idea of “the creative festival maker”, which we loosely understood as a dialogical curatorial role.
Joining Karl and I on the organising team for the 2023 conference, were Marianne Ní Chinnéide from University of Galway and Katie Lowry, representing the Creative Europe Desk Ireland. In our initial discussions, coming in the aftermath of Covid, there was much talk of uncertainty, the difficulties festivals were facing to keep their organisations afloat, and a fatigue being experienced in the wake of the pandemic. In seeking a theme to guide us, words like “communion”, “gathering”, “joy”, “adaptation”, “place” and “celebration” were recurrent. In the end we settled on “the changing landscape of festival”, which we hoped would incorporate all of the above.
As in 2020, once the theme was agreed upon, it became a lot easier to find a focus for our search for a key note speaker, though this task turned out to be far from easy. In fact we spent many weeks discussing who we could ask that would provide an inspirational talk to the diversity of festival makers we knew would be in the room, - someone who would simultaneously speak to the international large scale festivals and the small voluntary run festivals. After several months, during which we followed a couple of leads that came up with nothing, Karl proposed Kim Cook, the Director of Creative Initiatives at the Burning Man Project in Navada, USA. Her CV as a creative producer and videos of her giving talks at other events were compelling and happily, when approached, she accepted our invitation.
Once we had the theme and the key note confirmed, the rest of the programming fell into place relatively easily, as each member of the curatorial team opted to manage different elements of the programme, and the Galway based production company Milestone Inventive were appointed to look after the production side of the conference.
Much to the organising committee’s delight, the conference attracted a capacity attendance, with over three hundred people signed up to participate. As I was heading up from the south of the country, Karl asked me if I would pick up Kim at Shannon Airport and bring her to Galway. I was very happy to oblige, and even more so when the duty grew to include an extra day, as Kim was booked to arrive on the Tuesday. Thus I was presented with the pleasure of spending two days with Kim, getting to know her as we travelled up from the airport, over dinner and taking an unhurried drive out to Mamm Cross and down to the coast for a seafood lunch the following day.
Enjoying the Connemara scenery with Kim Cook out by Maam Cross
On the Thursday morning after the official welcomes, Kim gave her key note address. While bedazzling the delegates with examples of the extraordinary sculptural spectacles created for Burning Man, and the mindboggling scale of the operation, Kim spoke with humility and humour. Her enthusiasm for the act of festival making, of facilitating gatherings around art that bring joy, of the need to be always adapting and ever responsive to place, held me spell bound, as, based on feedback I heard, it did for so many attendees at the conference.
Over the following day and a half, the gathered community of festival makers, funders, academics and artists engaged enthusiastically in workshops, panels discussions, and informally over food and drinks. Highlights for me included the presentation by Liam McCarthy about working with a youth panel to manage the Bualadh Bos Festival, who in spite of his young advisors recommending he try not to be funny, delivered a hilarious and insightful presentation. Cavan Arts Festival‘s Kim McCafferty also managed a good mix humour and knowledge in her sharing about the value of mentoring in the festival makers journey. Opening up a discussion that I believe will be central to festival making going forward, the climate action panel looked at steps festivals can take to make their operation more environmentally sustainable. For this event it was terrific to have Romane Boyer, the Festival Officer from Creative Carbon Scotland, an organisation that has, over for the last ten years, done so much to advance environmental sustainability issues in the arts in Scotland. And in keeping with her passionate commitment to climate action, Romane travelled by boat and train. Joining us remotely from the Netherlands to provide a continental European perspective was Marin De Boer, the Visual Curator and Environmental Officer from the Oerol Festival. The Irish context was given by Galway International Arts Festival General Manager John Crumlish. On the second day of the conference, I was particularly enthralled by the panel discussion chaired by Dr Bernadette Quinn, which sought to get clarity around the term Festival Maker that had emerged during the conference in 2020. With help from the panel of Cork Midsummer Festival’s Director Lorraine Maye, Artist Alan James Burns, carnival and festival maker Dominic Campbell, and the gathered attendees, the complex role of the festival maker was interrogated, revealing among other things it included being comfortable with not always knowing what you are doing.
After two busy days with the community of festival makers I left Galway enthused and energised that the changing landscape of festivals in Ireland is in safe hands.