Edinburgh International Festival Research Articles

Reclaiming the Human: Edinburgh International Festival and Book Festival Diary 2023

In this diary of Edinburgh’s 2023 Festivals, Mario Relich underlines common themes around what makes us human, and the return of ‘offence’.

Events Innovation and Resilience During Uncertainty: Reflections from the Festival City!

As I sit at my desk, as the nights draw in and the temperatures fall, my mind is transported to the summer of 2022 and the re-emergence of Edinburgh as a Festival City (world leading apparently!) as it was the first time the festivals had been able to operate without strict COVID regulations. Edinburgh Festivals consists of 11 recurring events held in Edinburgh each year and before the pandemic struck, the August festivals combined (Edinburgh International Festival; Edinburgh Festival Fringe; Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo; Edinburgh International Book Festival and Edinburgh Art Festival) were the world’s third largest ticketed event, just behind the Olympics and football World Cup in scale, selling millions of tickets each year. Together, the five August festivals comprise over 5,000 events across Scotland’s capital, welcoming audiences of 4.4 million and over 25,000 artists, writers and performers from 70 countries and transform Edinburgh into a prominent cultural destination every summer (Festivals Edinburgh, 2020). This morning’s launch of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society’s review of the year 2022: an in-depth look at the work it has accomplished over the past 12 months also makes me reflect on the summer long gone. With unease caused by a new wave of COVID in early 2022, there was still uncertainty that a fully formed Fringe could take place this August and that Edinburgh would once again be a mecca for artists, tourists and industry to visit as the Festivals (Film, International and Fringe) celebrated their 75th year (Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2022).

Remembering Molly MacEwen: Sue Harries and Alasdair MacEwen in Conversation

Molly MacEwen’s design career took off after serving as Micheál mac Liammóir’s apprentice at the Dublin Gate during the mid-1930s and following her design work on the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. MacEwen went on to make a significant contribution to Irish and Scottish theatre design that has received little recognition in existing theatre scholarship. Illustrated by images of materials from (for the most part) the Scottish Theatre Archive’s Molly MacEwen collection (1948-1961), this article comprises an introduction to MacEwen, followed by a composite of selected conversations from interviews with MacEwen’s niece, Sue Harries, and nephew, Alasdair MacEwen. We learn of MacEwan’s familial and personal links to continental Europe, her unrequited devotion to mac Liammóir, and her successes in designing at Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre and for the Edinburgh International Festival after leaving the Gate in 1947 to work in Scotland. The dialogues in this article also reveal that MacEwen was a very shy and retiring woman, and that the men with whom she worked – including Edwards, mac Liammóir, and Tyrone Guthrie – took her for granted and possibly diminished the extent of her work. This situation, combined with gender inequalities and the collaborative nature of MacEwen’s design roles, may have led to her work being overlooked at the time and in pertinent publications on design and theatre. This article seeks to go some way towards recovering MacEwen’s important achievements for theatre history. Key Words: Molly MacEwen, Dublin Gate Theatre, Scottish theatre, design, women in theatre, Edinburgh International Festival, Michéal mac Liammóir

‘My native English now I must forgo’: Global Shakespeare at the Edinburgh International Festival

This article focuses on productions of William Shakespeare’s plays in languages other than English throughout the history of the Edinburgh International Festival. It aims to demonstrate that there has been an evolution towards global Shakespeare at the Edinburgh International Festival, and that Shakespeare stagings have been both an active agent and a product of the interconnectedness of theatre cultures in international festivals. The article considers three categories that illustrate the evolution of Shakespeare festival productions: Shakespeare without his language, heteroglossic Shakespeare, and new-brand Shakespeare. These categories are used to evaluate audience reception and assess shifts in Shakespeare studies regarding global Shakespeare.

Reclaiming reality: Edinburgh International Festival Diary 2019

A personal review of the Edinburgh International Festivals.

L’Archivio Demarco. La poetica dello spazio e l’artista come esploratore

The Demarco Archive is a cultural institution characterized by a complex profile. The unstoppable dynamism of its founder, Richard Demarco, and the dense network of artistic events he organized against the backdrop of the historic Edinburgh International Festival make slippery any attempt at a definition; placing it within precise geographical and disciplinary limits would in fact risk offering a partial idea of it. The objective of this article is therefore to propose a possible reading through two conceptual nodes: the journey, intended as the discovery of the 'spirit of the place' (genius loci), and the role of the artist as explorer. Both are the points on which Demarco for over fifty years has oriented his career as a teacher, impresario, curator and artist. Undertaking this direction will allow us to touch some of the main initiatives of the archive, such as Strategy-Get Arts and Edinburgh Arts Journey, and to retrace the political, aesthetic, philosophical and pedagogical credo of its founder, whose goal is to re-establish a relationship between ethics and aesthetics as well as restoring the original regenerative function of art.

The Arts and International Relations: The Evolving Identity of the Edinburgh International Festival in the Cold War Era

This article attempts to discuss the delicate relationship between the arts and international politics and the instrumental role the arts may play in international relations. The paper sets the Cold War as the stage and uses the Edinburgh International Festival as the subject of research to trace the interplay between the arts and international relations. Specifically, the article answers the questions of how the festival was impacted by the changing international relations over the Cold War period and how the festival as an arts organization exerted influence on international politics.

Citizen Cocreation in Tourist and Cultural Events

The aim of this research is to illustrate that in event planning and organization several actors are involved and each of them in specific local communities plays a key active role in the event's success. Event managers and socioinstitutional actors are increasingly looking at events as a mechanism to enhance tourism development in the regions where the events are organized. Therefore, the empowerment of residents and their involvement in the process of territorial development becomes of paramount importance. In this sphere, service-dominant logic is the main theoretical framework of interest, as it embraces the assumption that a host community's involvement in the process of valuation of local traditions, environment, and knowledge of the territory is an essential factor in both tourist and cultural events. Service-dominant logic enables all social and economic actors to be recognized as key actors in resource integration, service provisioning, and value cocreation. Furthermore, in their resource integrating, service provisioning, value cocreating activities, each actor plays an active and dynamic role, thus representing operant resources. Research conducted using Ebsco-source (July 2015), exclusively on academic peer-reviewed journals, highlights articles based on the topic of service-dominant logic and articles regarding management in touristic and cultural events. No articles merging these two spheres were found. The original value of this research lies in demonstrating that service-dominant logic and management in tourist and cultural events are a natural fit. Through multiple case studies, the article examines four international events "Ravello Festival," "Umbria Jazz Festival," "Edinburgh International Festival," and "Singapore International Festival of Arts."

Festivals: What Good Are They? What Are They Good at? The Case of Edinburgh 2017

Festivals:What Good Are They? What Are They Good at? The Case of Edinburgh 2017 Ric Knowles The seventieth-anniversary incarnation of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) in 2017 was, as far as theatre went, neither as international nor as festive as might have been expected. The Edinburgh Fringe, founded in the same year as an open-access alternative to the EIF, was, in spite of its anarchic feel on the streets as spectators elbowed past weirdly dressed figures hawking their shows, neither as alternative nor as open access as its promoters would have us believe. The EIF was dominated by bleak English-language offerings—some powerful, some not, from the UK and Ireland.1 The Fringe was dominated by stand-up comedy at corporate venues and was often, as many flyers asserted, "wacky" or "outrageous," but in entirely normative ways; it was also, with some notable exceptions, only rarely alternative in any political or aesthetic sense. And only rarely did either festival offer or take new directions. Along with the Festival d'Avignon, the EIF is the progenitor of multi-arts festivals founded to shore up European culture and civilization in the wake of World War II, and it remains among the most prestigious. The Fringe, with 300 venues, 3,398 shows, 53,232 performances, and 2.7 million tickets sold in 2017, is the largest of the world's 250-plus fringes, and according to its publicity posters, the progenitor of all fringes. But although the EIF, with audiences of over 450,000 and sales of £4.3 million in 2017, is dominated by classical music and the Fringe overwhelmingly by stand-up,2 apart from venue sizes and ticket prices the distinctions between the events as theatre are decreasingly clear. The cu-rated EIF relies more and more upon co-productions and collaborations and focuses increasingly on English-language shows and the locally Scottish—the absence of which was one of the initial discontents that led to the founding of the Fringe. The Fringe, on the other hand, relies increasingly upon large-venue conglomerates (Assembly, C Spaces, Gilded Balloon, Pleasance, Summerhall, Traverse, Underbelly, Zoo), each of which is in various ways curated, makes its own programming and financial arrangements with companies, controls material conditions such as scheduling, set up, and strike time, and presents its [End Page 369] own independent program. The Fringe also increasingly features curated programs from various disciplinary interests (Dance Base, Aurora Nova celebration of physical theatre) or national or cultural ones (Arab Arts Focus, Big in Belgium, CanadaHub, Taiwan Season, Focus Korea). And although Fringe venues, unlike the EIF's traditional spaces, in addition to ubiquitous church and community halls, tents, bars, and restaurants, included a swimming pool, a boat, a bathroom, a racetrack, and at least one shipping crate in 2017, in terms of programming there were many shows—Mies Julie from South Africa, for example, or Hong Kong Three Sisters—that would not have been out of place at the EIF. Meanwhile, some shows at the EIF—Australia's Meow Meow cabaret and Forced Entertainment's Real Magic—would have been a good fit for the Fringe. The offerings at both, as at festivals everywhere, included new writing, solo shows, adaptations of classics, physical, immersive, and devised theatre, and installations. This is what festivals are good at. But what cultural work do they—can they—perform? What new directions can they take? New Writing The site at which the EIF and Fringe most clearly converge is the Traverse, which hosted the EIF's Meet Me at Dawn in 2017. Traverse is the most explicitly curated and least predatory of the Fringe's corporate venues, in that its Fringe programming is an extension of its year-round mandate dedicated to new writing. Meet Me at Dawn was one of three shows at the EIF by Edinburgh-based playwright Zinnie Harris, and one of the best pieces of new writing at the 2017 festivals.3 Helen (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) and Robyn (Neve McIntosh), a couple, entered wet, having swum ashore after the sinking of their rented boat. "Are you okay?" From this beginning Harris led the characters and the audience through a magic...

The Hilarity of Unhappiness in Oh Tae-suk’s Tempest: Cross-Cultural Access and Precolonial/Indigenous Aesthetics

Oh Tae-suk’s The Tempest , staged at the 2011 Edinburgh International Festival, is one of the most recent Koreanized productions of Shakespeare. Investigating the multiple indigenous elements embedded in Oh’s Tempest and drawing on Oh’s interview comments (some of which have never been published before), this paper asks how, and to what extent, Oh’s adaptation has established cross-cultural access. Specifically, in response to the adaptation’s reputation of “lightness,” this paper reveals the linguistic, historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and aesthetic strata that constitute Oh’s Tempest as well as its latent postcolonial interpretive possibilities. Oh’s adaptation illuminates the challenges and implications of delivering indigenously based works to contemporary audiences cross-culturally.

Report from the Edinburgh International Festival August 2015

This peer reviewed article examines a range of performances staged across the group of festivals known collectively as the Edinburgh Festival in August 2015. Using scenography as a frame of reference it focuses on five performances in venues ranging from a small cabaret bar on The Free Fringe to the Edinburgh International Conference Centre with a seating capacity of over one thousand. It argues that despite the immense differences in scale, financial investment, technology and ticket prices across this range of work, certain common motifs could be identified. By close analysis of the materiality of these productions it reveals how these themes, including a form of nostalgia for an imagined more ‘stable’ past, were manifested through the scenography.

“landscapism” at the speed of light: darkness and illumination in motion

In conditions of darkness, how is landscape experienced when mediated by the artful staging of mass movement and artificial illumination? The article offers a response to this question of perception, phenomena and sensation, through culturally informed consideration of Speed of Light, a performance event staged in Holyrood Park, produced by arts charity NVA, during the 2012 Edinburgh International Festival. Speed of Light was a large‐scale, open‐air public artwork, illuminating the form and motion of walkers and runners, fusing the role of performer and spectator. Following an introduction to the event's design and delivery, and consideration of recent literatures on spaces of darkness and the illumination of landscape in contemporary social life, the authors describe and explain their respective roles as participating walker and runner in Speed of Light, and offer a series of participant‐informed interpretations. Observations arising from the social experience of darkness, illumination and motion, lead to closing reflections on what is termed “landscapism”. Landscapism, a sensibility encapsulated in Speed of Light, is suggested as a transporting and enchanting affect achieved by estranging the expected encounter with topography and atmosphere. It is a staged sensibility that dramatizes the experience of looking at, listening to and feeling for the temporary transformation of landscape.

Theatre Reviews

The Taming of the Shrew, Globe to Globe. Dir. Haissam Hussain, 26-27 May 2012
 Coriolanus, Edinburgh International Festival. Dir. Lin Zhaohua, 20-21 August 2013

Introduction: Global Shakespeare for Anglophone Audiences

Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance vol. 11 (26), 2014; DOI: 10.2478/mopa-2014-0002 Reflecting on the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival, Bridget Escolme hopes that this unique project might paradoxically be the beginning of a decentring of Shakespeare in global knowledge production. What questions, she asks, might this Festival continue to provoke that arent about Shakespeare? And how might theatres and universities start to explore and answer them (309)? Escolme joins other scholars left asking questions, about Shakespeare, non-Shakespeare and performance, in reaction to an unprecedented few years of foreign productions staged for Anglophone audiences. Many of those excellent responses are collated in Shakespeare Beyond English (2013), edited by Susan Bennett and Christie Carson, and A Year of Shakespeare (2013), edited by Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan. This special edition of Multicultural Shakespeare is part of that response and seeks to engage with and develop the debate started by these two important books. We do this not least with a review of both books which productively places them in dialogue with one another, but also with a rich, eclectic set of articles that considers the genesis of the Globe to Globe Festival, foreign Shakespeare performance practices, the politics of translation and the ethics of reviewing such productions, amongst other things. A Year of Shakespeare offers an archive of accounts of an exceptionally wide range of theatrical experiences made available within a short space of time and originating in many different cultures (Wells xxiii). Similarly, Shakespeare Beyond English serves, according to its editors, as a scholarly archive of the Globe to Globe Festival; albeit one they hope challenge[s] the business of Shakespeare and so is a great deal more (Bennett and Carson 3). Rather than emulate these comprehensive works, this journal is not an archive but rather a diverse snapshot of scholars analysis of foreign Shakespeare in 2014, focussing on a range of performances from Globe to Globe, to the Edinburgh International Festival, to the Royal Shakespeare Complete Works Festival. Escolme wonders Lecturer in Early Modern English, University of Kent. London Shakespeare Centre, Kings College London. Sarah Dustagheer, Aleksandra Sakowska Introduction: Global Shakespeare for Anglophone Audiences 10 Sarah Dustagheer, Aleksandra Sakowska how theatres and universities might begin to explore the questions raised by foreign Shakespeare and we hope that this journal begins some of that exploratory work. Shakespeare remains a focus but, again picking up on Escolmes thoughts about questions that are not about the early modern playwright, articles here offer thoughts on contemporary Chinese, Indian and Polish theatre practices from practitioners and researchers working in these areas. The next few pages introduce the articles that follow, but also seek to identify three of the reoccurring themes that they examine: performance spaces, languages and reception. Performance Spaces For David Wiles, the play-as-event belongs to the space, and makes the space perform as much as it makes actors perform (1); the importance of space, as asserted by Wiles, is confirmed by the discussion of many foreign Shakespeare productions. The way a space performs in the sense of working both with or even against a production is pertinent for shows which are transferred across not only different theatre spaces but different countries too. For the Globe to Globe Festival, the specific performance conditions of Londons reconstructed theatre challenged many companies performing during 2012. Reviewing Andrea Baracco and Vincenzo Mannas Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar) for Shakespeare Beyond English, Sonia Massai points out that the performance space offered by the Globe is not neutral and often clashes with the aesthetic and more generally artistic principles that inform the theatrical language and approach shared by some directors, including Baracco (97). …

Representational tactics: approaching two Scottish performances of mental illness through the work of Michel de Certeau

This article uses the ideas of ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’ drawn from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life in order to examine two specific Scottish performances and determine their conception of mental illness, their approach to performance, and how these performances relate to the structures surrounding them. The first, The Wonderful World of Dissocia, was written by Anthony Neilson, premièred at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2004, and was directly supported by the Scottish Executive’s National Programme for Improving Mental Health and Well Being. The second, Does Anyone Know, is a short film resulting from work with prisoners with mental health problems in the High Dependency Unit at HMP Edinburgh by the charity Theatre NEMO, and includes performances by prisoners themselves. Taken together, these performances give some sense of the contingent position of performances of mental illness, the ways in which actors, writers, and service users act within the structures of theatres, prisons, and hospitals, to work around and within the ‘strategies’ which constitute psychiatric discourse.

A Conversation on The Wooster Group's Hamlet

This conversation took place during the Gdansk Festival, 1–10 August 2009, where The Wooster Group performed its internationally acclaimed Hamlet (2006), directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. The conversation, led by Maria Shevtsova and edited by her for publication, was part of the conference organized under the auspices of the Festival by Jerzy Limon, the Festival's director. Here LeCompte and two performers from the company, Kate Valk and Ari Fliakos, discuss how they generated the work, and develop their thoughts in answers to questions from the audience. Later this year The Wooster Group will perform Hamlet on 10–13 August at the Edinburgh International Festival. Maria Shevtsova is the Chair Professor of Drama and Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Co-Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Word Power Books: Edinburgh

photo : kay williams 80 World Literature Today outpost W ord Power Books, Edinburgh , is a secret engine room for Scottish literature . I suggest this because Word Power is not generally acknowledged by the “cultural management industry ” or included at all in the special cultural supplements of the mainstream press. Well placed close to the university in Edinburgh, the bookshop tends to be “discovered” by individuals rather than recommended regularly by teaching staff. For some, their discovery may come too late to benefit their studies, but that will always be part of the nature of serendipity. Word Power is a center of energy because it is human and not bureaucratic ; it is not dependent on outside sources for its funding, policies, aims, and activities. The contained space it occupies on West Nicholson Street compacts this energy so that it is all the more effective. It could be seen as “autopoetic” in that it is self-generating, self-developing, and self-supporting. Word Power is important for Scottish literature because it is unreservedly national and international in its stock, which is carefully chosen, again because of limited space. Word Power’s staff understands that literature must be of its time, in terms of involvement in social and political struggles, as well as beyond time in terms of its art and skill. Literature must be experimental and traditional , controversial and philosophical, tragic and comic, female and male, new and old, academic and general. The first readings by Scottish pamphlet poets were held at Word Power. This movement was initiated by myself at the millennium to encourage people to publish their own poetry independently in pamphlet form, at a time when this was considered a lesser form of publishing . (These days, many poets have adopted this medium.) Word Power not only encouraged these readings but also stocks the poets’ pamphlets, while other bookshops do not. At Word Power book events, people talk with and meet one another. Everyone is made to feel welcome. Its program of events during the Edinburgh International Festival in August and at its Radical Book Fair in October is “alternative,” concentrating on quality and content , ignoring celebrity and fashion. Its own publishing list is likewise individual and authoritative, inviting further thought and discussion, as is exemplified in its most recent publication, Unstated, essays by various Scottish writers on the future of Scotland. Although Edinburgh won itself international status as a unesco City of Literature, that is more or less seen as a marketing tool for tourism and festivals. Word Power tends to be below the horizon of those who promote the City of Literature. For these reasons, I highly value Word Power and consider that it plays an essential part in the continuing vitality of Scottish literature in its contributions at home and abroad. – Tessa Ransford The author of sixteen volumes of poetry, Tessa Ransford founded the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. Word Power Books Edinburgh ...

Theatre review: 2008: Macbeth

2008: Macbeth Based on Shakespeare. Adapted by Grzegorz Jarzyna A TR Warszawa production Edinburgh International Festival The Lowland hall at Ingliston, a vast hangar-like space, was transformed into a contemporary theatre for the Polish production of Macbeth at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. Conjuring the atmosphere of bombed out buildings, a bunker, a ruined castle, it was an ideal setting for a performance that referenced horror film and video games. The play was transposed to Iraq during the American Occupation. Duncan as King of Scotland was commander in chief, Macbeth one of his generals. It starts abruptly …

Opera notes: events to look out for in 2012

Working in primary care, we are used to combining data gleaned from different sources, sometimes simultaneously; melding the spoken word, (including hesitations, pacing, and emphasis) with body language, and observational physical examination, to name but a few. So it can be in art; opera offers a multi-media experience, with real-time data streams of words, melody, rhythm, scene, lighting, all in combination. Sometimes the music tells you what's happening, when the words don't add up. So; familiar, but different; another way, perhaps a refreshing one, of thinking anew about the problems we all face. Can I share with you some upcoming performances you might consider, either as a neophyte or an addict, or something in between …? Tickets are already on sale for the final months of the Royal Opera's season, and the highlight is undoubtedly Berlioz's epic Les Troyens, which he never saw performed in its entirety. Beginning with the Wooden Horse, and ending with the death of abandoned Dido, this charts Aeneas' destiny towards Rome. Spectacular musical and scenic effects are invoked, personal tragedy (and an erotic fantasy) are played out. Think Aida, on a bigger canvas; the tunes are just as good, too. The cast is exceptional. David McVicar will undoubtedly bring vivid production values, and Pappano will ensure an electric performance of one of the 19th century's forgotten glories, ‘rediscovered’ in seminal productions in the 1960s in London and Glasgow. Edinburgh International Festival 2012. The Makropulos Case. Opera North. 11 & 13 August. Photo: Ylva Kihlberg by Natascha Thiara Rydvald. The summer festivals are also selling now; apart from the ‘known known’ of Glyndebourne, I would direct your attention to Grange Park and its offshoot Neville Holt in Leicestershire, and to that other jewel, the Buxton Festival. A few days here really is as restorative as taking the waters. Richard Strauss's Intermezzo, a curious autobiographical account of his own stormy marriage to Pauline, rarely performed, has a double bill of Sibelius and Rimsky-Korsakov as one of its neighbours; for those not fixated on opera, there are lots of literary and other musical treats, as well as the physical delights of the Peaks — lots of fresh air! Further north, the Edinburgh Festival gathers together things from the UK regions and the EU. From Leeds comes Opera North's Makroupolos Case, a sort of end-of-life conundrum concerning an enigmatic diva and a potion. More potions feature in the Welsh's Tristan and Isolde, (the performances they bring to Edinburgh might enable some doubters to appreciate the truly transcendent nature of a work sometimes overwhelmed by the physical attributes of singers capable of singing it. This is one of the origins of the famous ‘it ain't all over til …’ aphorism). From the Aix Festival, William Christie brings Charpentier's David et Jonathas, which was composed 200 years previously, concerning yet another doomed love; this operatic rarity will almost certainly be given a ravishingly beautiful performance. So, lots of people working through partner strife, with a number of outcomes. And a lot of wonderful music!

Lighting Out for the Festival

Director Jonathan Mills decided that the main theme of the Edinburgh International Festival would be the cultures of the Asian countries. It was perhaps a risky choice, and questioned in some quarters according to press reports, but he delivered one of the best Festivals of recent years. I intend to describe here a personal and very partial odyssey of events and encounters at the 2011 Festival, primarily covering the Asian productions, as well as some Traverse plays and Book Festival events, and the various byways of less publicised events.