 Yn ydych chi'n gwybod, mae'n gweithio ar y cyfnod yng nghymru. Yn ymgyrch ymwneud o'r cyfnod, mae'n gweithio ar y cyfnod yng nghymru, yw Creador Scotland a'r Yn Ymgyrch Carybwy yn Cwyltaeth Cymru. Mae'n gweithio i'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod. Yn ymgyrch, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio, mae'n 10 argystau hynny o'r Yn Ymgyrch Carybwy yng Nghymru, a'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod yma, sydd o'n mor hefyd nhw'n gweithio. Twillim ymgyrch ar y cyfnod yng nghymru a ffordd o'r cyfnod sy'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n lle'n llwyddoedd. Yn ymgyrch ymgyrch ar y cyfnod a'r cyfnod yng nghymru, maethon, ymmygwyr, yng nghymru, gweithio'n yn niall, pan yn Ysgol. a rydyn ni eisiau ei holl, dyma i'r oeddu cyfanent a hwn i ni ddechrau, dyma'u amgylchol, rydyn ni eisiau tui o'r ymddangos i'r ymddangos ac o'r ymddangos cyfanentroot ein bod yn gwneud yr unrhyw. Rydyn ni'n cyfan mewn gwirioneddau dyma yma neu oedd iddynt mae ei wneud iawn a atbodaeth yn ei dda i wneud eich hunain. Rydyn ni wedi'u graddiffen ardal. Neu'n mynd i amgylch chi, astud yn cael ei gael ar amlo ymddangos i ymddangos o'i fanlu I will not introduce them all now, but we will stay here afterwards and you can come up and meet them. The theme of this morning is what are festivals for? There are a lot of emerging festivals in new countries and there are a lot of established festivals. We are delighted to have the two directors of the most established festivals at least in the western world. That is the Edinburgh International Festival and the Holland Festival. We are going to ask them to say a few words in a moment. We are going to show a very short video of our work to date. Then there will be a kind of conversation between the delegates here, the two speakers and of course you. If you put your hand up I will come with a mic and we have got a mic at the back as well. So, I will just show our video to see the kind of work we have been doing. Thank you. I just wish I got in between traditional one. The friendship was really informative. It is really inspiring to see what has come out of different parts of the world in terms of us. This is about connecting the Britishism and the shakers in the region to those in Europe who have actually looked by working in the future. Then we realised there is more I need to do with rebranding, with positioning myself on an international scale. It is really lovely to do workshops and talk fest because it is much faster to do that than make a project. It is a key time to meet the key stakeholders in the sector. This workshop has changed my perspective on the arts culture in a huge way actually. So this kind of networking and connections is what I have seen over my three and a half years at Disney Arts. This is what we want to accomplish from a loli and this is also the vision that we have for both cultures to connect. I should have said as well that the platform that it links all the artists and the rest of the world is World Cultures Connect. I encourage you to look at that. This is being live streamed on that platform. So it is a very useful platform. So now to our speakers. First of all, Fergus Llynehan, director of the Edinburgh International Festival, well known to you all unsure. He came from the Sydney Festival where he did a fantastic job of changing a little bit of the culture there. And also from the Dublin Theatre Festival before that. So Fergus, over to you. Thank you. I think I'm going to stand up because you can't see at the back. But first of all just to everyone, welcome to Edinburgh. It's wonderful to have you all here. We must do this event about lunchtime next year though. Collectively agree this. So if I'm a little slow and you'll excuse me. I mean I always make the assumption everyone knows what our festivals are. But I do want to break it down a little bit because obviously different people have come for the first time or every time. The Edinburgh International Festival is part of a suite of festivals here in Edinburgh in August. Which I mean I'm just to mention a few because ourselves, the Fringe Festival, the Tattoo, the Military Tattoo at the Castle, the Book Festival and the Art Festival. And that is part of a larger suite of festivals that takes place in Edinburgh throughout the year. So actually the pictures here tell the story of our festival quite nicely because these are the productions we've had in this theatre. This is Caucifarn Dute, which is a co-production festival d'Exon Provence, which opens tonight. So this is Scottish Ballet here, who did a piece by Angeline Prelocage and the Canadian Royale for Crystal Pipe. And some around the other corner is a picture of Chechina Barthely, which was a production of Belivies Norma with Salzburg Festival. So in their way they sort of tell the story, a Scottish Festival and a French Festival coming together with a German orchestra to do work by an Austrian. Or a Canadian and a French choreographer working at the Scottish Ballet Company. So essentially we are kind of international at our core and the whole foundation of this festival was very much around internationalism and the idea of internationalism. We'll talk a little bit more about that. So again, just a big welcome. I won't pre-empt too much about what we're going to talk about, but I'm really interested to hear why this group is interested in festivals and international collaboration. Because I think there's an interesting question about that. Does that mean? OK, I'll answer that here. So anyway, I will hand over to Ruth Mackenzie, if you will. Can you introduce Ruth? Ruth is the artistic director of the Holland Festival. Before that she was the director of the Cultural Olympiad for London 2012. Before that festivals such as Manchester International Festival, Chichester Festival, Vienna Festival and of course Scottish Opera. She's also been, she's worked for five secretaries of state for Coventure. So that gives her a fantastic background. Thank you very much and thank you also folks for your great welcome. It's great to be here and have the chance to start as we always do, especially in the middle of the night, reflecting on why you have a festival. And what it should be doing. It's particularly good today actually in Edinburgh when not only are all the artists and producers and festival makers in town, but also culture ministers from all over the world. So that's a very interesting clash of culture if you like from those that do. That's all of you guys to those that are meant to empower us to do. So it's a particularly good time I think for us to be talking about what we're all here for and how we can all do a better job. And that I think within the boundaries of live streaming. So remember every indiscreet and honest work you make is going around the whole world. It's a really good chance for us to try and see how we can do a better job to create the conditions for artists and of course for audiences, which is our other great starting point. And maybe I should just say that the Holland Festival was set up the same year as the Edinburgh International Festival. We were both created in 1947, so both these festivals are now pretty old. The same year as Avignon as well, as Ferg has suggested in the spirit after the war when these cities of Edinburgh and Amsterdam and Avignon were all undergoing great hardships. They had enormous damage to their infrastructure. They'd been suffering terribly for years during the Second World War. They didn't have food. They didn't have schools, hospitals, everything. They had nothing. But they all turned to international performing artists and invested in international performing artists to help them build the future. I think that for me is an awesome responsibility that we inherit that in 1947 a festival was that important to the everyday lives of people in Edinburgh and Amsterdam and Avignon that they were prepared to sacrifice in order to create those festivals. So the Holland Festival happens every year, like the Edinburgh International Festival, we happen in Amsterdam. Like the Edinburgh International Festival we look for the greatest artists from around the world and we try to find that same urgency, that same reason why international artists can help us understand the future. So that's my starting point. So perhaps a good start, a second starting point is to open up that conversation a bit to why now and what is it for now. Has it changed? Before we start, is this working? Yep. We were talking earlier just about an article I read recently just asking three questions of a festival. One was what it is, in other words, what is the actual show? Is it any good? Is the performance good? The other is where it is, the actual location, which I think is really critical. But then the third is the why. We were just saying earlier on, we're very lucky because we had such a strong why. Certainly with Edinburgh I was saying nobody really sat down and said you know what we really need is to celebrate art. That was not the foundation of it. What they said was we really need to find a way of celebrating which is not based on nationalism, which is secular, and which will celebrate all that we share. Because the actual idea of a multi-genar arts festival, we can't find one before 47. So there's things like Salzburg, which was about Wagner and things like the Venice Biennale and Cannes Film Festival. But that idea of saying this is not about one thing, it's not about Scottish work or it's not about opera. It's about the actual spirit of international harmony. And I think that still absolutely informs it. And it's I think a credit to Edinburgh and the quality of governance that's completely understood. And those pressures that some would say or put to bear on others about you know what you should be doing this or you should be doing that. The bottom line is that it has to be a moment where international kind of harmony is the focus. And that's not always easy. But I think I would say with ourselves and particularly at the moment I would say that the founding principles of it are as they were. I think that's right. And I think that one of the big responsibilities I feel about the festival is that the founding principles, which is your artist led but your artist led, that means you're inviting artists but respecting their ideas. So you know I would never dream of saying to an artist, please could you make a show about this topic and can it be this long and have this number of people. That isn't the job of a festival I think like ours. Our job is to say your work is fantastic to an artist you know we're really interested in seeing how we can work with you and how you could come to our festival and we can you know showcase your thinking. But of course that is in the context of our audience and that is incredibly important because it's also our job to think about the journey that our existing audiences have been on and we both share audiences of enormous loyalty who behave as you know as the chair people of a fan club who are expert about our festivals. Both of us are interestingly, this is our second festival this year. We both started at the same time and I'm sure you agree. You know you spend a lot of your time talking to audiences who have been coming to the festival. If not quite since 1947 but certainly for decades and who really keep the whole reclaim in the most brilliant way and we have to respect that history and the way that our audience are the keepers of that history. But also of course we have to find new audiences and reflect the reality today and in Amsterdam one of I think the most fascinating things for me has been to begin working with local partners who might be third generation Turkish immigrants or who might be second generation Moroccan immigrants or who might just have arrived in town from Syria and to be finding art that is world class that shows the best of their cultural and contemporary traditions but that can surprise and amaze the traditional audiences of the Holland Festival as well as engage a new audience. And that is one of I think the most interesting ways for me to begin to renew that urgency that Amsterdam felt in 1947. Yeah I mean I think it's always interesting I don't know with you but there's also the question of the challenge of the multi genre which I find you know because once you say you're international and you say you're multi genre well then people say well what are you doing about this and this and this and I think that's always finding that balance of the capacity for a festival to be able to develop or whether it can really reflect because you always there you realise on the one hand you've managed to sort of subvert everyone's normal the way they normally attend so you've got a kind of an openness that no one else has but then on the other hand you've only got a window of three weeks and I think that that's always an interesting challenge so can you to what degree can you sort of change the ecosystem, the cultural ecosystem within which you're working and to what degree are you essentially having to reflect? You're absolutely right and I actually find the idea of genres you know music, dance, drama, opera really restrictive at times and I mean I noticed we now, this is a really technical point forgive me but it's fundamental to the daily life of a festival director we have changed the way we organise our programme in the book we have for the programme which used to be in genres, music, theatre, dance, now it's in days, chronology so it tells you what's on on the first day then what's on on the second day but again for our traditional audiences we still had to have somewhere online you have to be able to look up in everything that is an opera or everything that is a play I was very pleased to find we had one piece in the 2016 festival that appeared under every single genre because the truth is that if you are artists led artists don't really think in terms of genre they just think about what they want to say and the tools that they will use and also it has to be said genre the idea of dance, drama, music being separate is a very limited western European cultural tradition and not a tradition that exists in other parts of the world I mean I don't know if any of you guys would like to jump in at that point For me I was I was caught up I was only, because we were busy doing workshops my name is Tasfair Wildamerton from Itopia Storyteller and what I'm trying to say is my plan was just to focus on the storytelling because there's not much time and I was really caught up by amazing dance performances amazing comedy shows and all those things that you see and you get leaflets and this seems interesting and you just go there and oh this is great and then you go to the other one and all of them you find some link that relates to what you do so you can't say I'm a storyteller I just need just stories you need humour in your stories you need to be musical in your storytelling you need to be an actor and this really was the case for me One of the things I'm interested in terms of this group is people who in terms of touring and in terms of becoming part of international festivals and that international conversation why it's so much more important for some countries and less important for others so when you think of it places like Quebec or places like Flanders and places where they have a lot of questions around cultural identity but there's a business logic obviously in relation to representing perhaps broadening the market for your work but I think in terms of practice for artists it's an enormous investment of time and energy and money to go overseas and for some artists it's a crucial part of their practice but we all know some artists just should stay at home and form something within that so I'm interested as to even outside of just the business side of touring and being part of festivals for the artist what that experience is and why it's important I'll ask Ebony and Rochelle to respond because I think it's very personal to their work Ebony Fafita from Tonga which is in the South Pacific the biggest region I think the bluest region in the world and I'd like to come to that but first just comment on what you were both talking about in terms of genre and just give a little bit of a perspective from my region and from my experience it's absolutely true what you're saying about how the divisions or fragmentation of our work as artists almost confuses it in the Pacific what I understand from the generation of my grandmother grandparents is that the artist were see that word even for us if I say artist back home people will think oh you're a painter so there isn't even that wide understanding of that word but from the generation of my grandparents those cultural guardians I think were singers no doubt were dancers were healers were the people who nurtured the land and everything that that encompassed community navigated the present understood the past there's so much woven into that that's where our work in the Pacific is trying to rekindle I guess in our artist that same sense of responsibility and connection and not try to box them into are you a choreographer or a writer because that has so many limitations to it and then what were we doing? I'm just asking the question in relation to as an artist say why do you meet others? Why international? Why not? So my country tiny tiny doesn't show up on a normal sized map I'm here with colleagues from Fiji and the Solomons you're lucky if you can see them on a map as well we know that we exist but the rest of the world doesn't and if they do they have a very generalized idea of our reality when not walking around in coconut bras we I'm not happy all the time we don't think that we live in paradise we want to leave all the time and we can't but really that's what my peers express is just such a longing to not be where they are to move and while that's exciting it's also really really but let me just jump in here to think about those ministers that are sitting in a room somewhere else I don't know but even if they're not from the Pacific we can think about how to how to get a message back to those politicians that have power over your lives because what you're talking about actually is a there's a policy term here in the UK has become very fashionable which is about placemaking and it's about the way in which artists have the voice have the power to tell the story of a place where they live and work and to if you like amplify to be a way of expressing the concerns of the citizens and of their audiences of their public back home and in a way when Fergus was talking about Quebec which again is a tiny little place in the middle of nowhere in Canada we're streaming I love Quebec but what is interesting about it is that for decades the political powers in Quebec went right we are going to give our artists money and opportunities to tell our stories exactly to tell about the complexity of our stories so it isn't just the stereotype of Quebec or indeed for those that don't know anything about Quebec it doesn't exist on the map decades Quebec gave money to artists and as a result there are artists from Quebec who have taken the message of Quebec around the world who represent Quebec around the world I mean the Edinburgh International Festival has invited artists from Quebec and I think you have to relate that investment and that policy to the result that those artists then have that opportunity but of course as Fergus was saying there are some artists where the place making process where what they want to say about their their own people, their own lives their own place actually is only for their own family and their own people you know and I think it's really important that point that because of course it's a different sort of oppression actually if it's only possible to be an artist and get funding if you are prepared to be an ambassador for your country and that is something that we as people who believe in artistic freedom need to be aware of and it's something that we find don't we as festival directors that we are not here to be we are here to represent artists to support artists to be free to say what they want to say and sometimes if they are supported by their by their political powers to be the ambassadors of Quebec that is a dangerous thing so it's okay in Quebec because the values of Quebec are for artistic freedom but it's a complicated opportunity and threat I think the political fashion for place making Mae gathau ymateb o'r ffrwng Malawi I am a theatre practitioner also a festival organizer a young festival organizer because my festival is just one year old I want just to contribute what she has said and he has said why international coming this side it has got also like freedom in terms of financial aspect or economic aspect like in most of African countries arts is not funded including my country like in my country there is no culture policy there is no arts council the only funding which is there it has just been introduced three months ago it's known as Malawi Culture Fund and that magic Malawi Culture Fund is limited they are targeting the theatre people like George my friend who is in music he has got nowhere to get money so the moment we travel like this side we have got a lot of things which we benefit financially because here arts I cannot say it's well funded but at least there is something which comes into arts the other thing is sharing experience like for us in Malawi we don't have like an institution where you can go and learn arts yes we have got the Chancellor others they have been at the University of Malawi they just have called it the Department of Performing Arts but out of 120,000 students who start for all levels it's only 40 people who are selected to study at that university and it has got some criteria if you don't have 06 credits you cannot go to the university like in my case I've got 5 credits I didn't manage to have 06 credits but I cannot go to that university so when we come here we also gain knowledge how we can operate in our countries and impart that knowledge to other countries like for my example I've done a theatre this is my 17th year in theatre I've learned a lot that those students who have gone under the University of Malawi so if I go there and I apply I want to study this they say go and write all levels you have 6 credits which doesn't make sense I applied for the university I think one in Netherlands, one in Switzerland just using my CV they said the work that you have done you are calling for them to do masters but in my country they are saying go and graduate so these are some of the things when we travel it depends the first was they have got a great impact in economic aspects because if I invite one of the artists from any country when he travels to that country automatically he's bringing the follow-ups to the country and he's contributing to the national maybe what so ever for example others they have attended the lack of stars lack of stars is one of the first which is well patronised from all over the world the government make a lot of money from lack of stars but they don't support us so when we have been like this network it also makes artists to be freely economically independent I was going to suggest that Ruth's point about relating it back to the policymakers is very important but clearly travelling to see festivals is an incredible opportunity to reflect on your own practice and your own country's practice I wonder if I would like to open it up to the floor here as well but one of the questions Ruth touched on that I'd like to talk a little bit more about or ask the festival directors to talk about what you said about the artists coming with an idea so you said earlier on that what festivals don't do really is show products but that it's a result of a relationship and I wonder if you could speak a little bit more about that as a very interesting idea I think that I mean it can be it can just be an idea I mean one of the things I think that people often one of the mistakes people make with a project and they go here's the fully formed project will you bring this to your festival whereas in fact what often happens is you go well I liked that performance or I loved the writing in it and what happens two years later we had Fogel o Paes who was here last year went along to a show and just loved the design of it and actually picked up the designer to work on a piece and met it four years time so that's what that's what you don't see and I think that that is the conversations that open up so I mean this is just advice from our seat is if you come to these discussions with a specific project and that project doesn't go on it's very tangential the way those conversations happen and often the most delicate of conversations are the genesis for a big involvement later on it's not kind of as linear as people might think I think this is always the hardest and most frustrating message in these sort of networking events because I started off in small scale touring theatre and of course all I did was have my packages to try and get festival directors to buy that was all I did but Fergus is right it's not about shopping it's not that we take a supermarket trolley and we go to the warehouse where you can buy shows for festivals and go up and down and say we have one of those and one of those that isn't how it works it is about a conversation and a process and the development of partnerships and of ideas and sometimes it can take years and sometimes it can happen really quickly and that is the most frustrating thing to say because I know when you are when I was representing a theatre company I'm happy to talk about anything I'd say anything to anybody but all I really wanted them to do was buy my show and it was really hard to understand why they wouldn't buy my show because of course my show was the best show in the world and it took me a few years to realise that it wasn't actually but so it is a hard it's a hard message but the truth is that if you are a curator and of course all the curators know this that is a skill it isn't being a shopper it's like being a cook you're trying to put together a banquet you're looking for lots and lots of different sorts of balances and flavours it's not about is this fish a good fish and a fresh fish it's about how many fish have I already got in my banquet so it is a process of dialogue and debate to come up with a way to make the best banquet ideas as well really struck me by saying about migration because I grew up in Ireland in the 80s and everybody left and that sense of thing and one of the things that's really emerging this August is this question of migration and a really interesting thought because of course artists are coming at it from the different point of view which is not about how do we deal with this issue it's why do people leave and also people have always left or why this English person in Holland and an Irish person in Scotland and you know why what is it that makes us move of course circumstance makes us move sometimes but it's much more than that and I think sometimes it's the kernel of an idea like that which becomes the start of the programming process and I mean so I think when it comes back to what we're saying at the beginning is what's the why of a festival and what's the point of it and then trying to understand that in conversation Hi everyone I'm Rochelle Amor I'm a writer and I co-host and co-produce a podcast back home called TNT Impact I have so much catching up to do on this conversation but the most recent dialogue that you guys are having as festival directors about curating and buying shows is a dialogue that happens at a level that doesn't even apply to Trinon and Tobago because of how our festivals are set up the biggest one that I'm sure everyone knows about is Carnival TNT Carnival is you know I guess after hearing you speak it is definitely a multi-genre festival in itself and it is mostly run by the government so it's not necessarily we don't necessarily have festival directors we have a carnival board so the organisation is very very different and that makes it a bit more difficult for artists working within that festival to use the platform for various expressions so for example we have our traditional carnival characters more than expressions we have limbo festivals we have Carnival Cairn Queen which is a costume design and that's huge it's a competition so there's a prize, there's a steel pan there's a soca so all of these things happen at the same time so it's kind of like an industry more than a festival and when you asked about the urgency why do we need to go abroad we had an Australian soca DJ who was actually touched on the podcast a few months ago and he said you know TNT invented soca music it's the home of soca music but there is soca music happening in Germany that's in German being sung there's soca music happening all around the world we don't know about it, we don't play it we don't invite those artists over we don't engage we are not part of that international conversation our culture is running away from us in that sense and the exact same thing happened with the steel pan and we are having to catch up after it because you know we don't go out there we don't tour, we don't you know and it's amazing because a friend of mine who lives in London recently went to the Berlin Carnival and then we're going to Notting Hill Carnival next week and there's this carnival and there's that carnival where are our traditional why isn't Damian Whiskey who's a traditional midnight robber touring to present so I said to Mark my friend at Notting Hill who's a DJ there as well I said why doesn't why don't you get Damian to perform at that and he goes we've never this band had an international traditional character to come and perform you get the musicians to come on their own they pay their own way they get paid so it's a gig more than anything else because who again it's private and they do their own thing and they make a lot of money in these international festivals but the actual people from the country where this carnival started are not involved so I think that's where the urgency lies for us what else did I have to do with everything Dam because I forget everything all the time oh sorry I will put up to the floor and then you still get you that time is running away with us I would just say if anybody was at our reception and saw Damian Whiskey as midnight robber it's something that you would never forget it was fantastic I'm going to open it up to the floor for questions we have other artists here who I hope will also be able to respond but it's over to you there's a microphone over there and if not well we can carry on George I just wanted to find out what rule do you think there is on the international festival platform for art from Africa, the Pacific and Caribbean which doesn't tell a story of a struggle and also which is a little bit more cosmopolitan and doesn't involve the traditional way which no one when we're back home wears any conservation that exists for everyone when you say can we do some ballet from Russia that isn't just tutus or can we do an Irish play that isn't by men in a pub it's I think there is this has to be the best platform because we do not have to just feed into existing expectations in relation to it of course I believe these festivals are the very best platform for that there's a lot of pressure for artists in Africa to sort of present that kind of in the mighty things there's a lot of pressure for African artists to sort of fit into that category and they feel as if that's the only way they can export their art and I feel like that's also fueled by the fact that they are the only artists that that actually mostly come to the international festivals it's no longer art for art's sake it's more parading sort of cultural differences it is the same when Scottish work goes somewhere else and people go commit the kills in the backpines so it's there's no doubt there's always I think that pressure to feed into cultural stereotypes Hi hello my name is Pierre I work for Cinco Central Newcastle and Edinburgh my question is to Ruth I'm also from Holland my question is there is a general perception that's much easier to work in wealthy countries like Scandinavia, Switzerland, Holland what are the challenges you find that perhaps we can find a resemblance when you are from Toga, when you are from Vanuatu, when you are from that area where you are from is there anything perhaps similar you know I have to be honest here and say that you are right that in what I am now obliged to call mainland Europe there is a level of funding and understanding about the importance of culture and the contribution of culture that means that for many of us who work in those cultural organisations we are respected we have a budget we have a level of resource and understanding that is an enormous privilege I think I've got one of the best jobs in the world and I cannot insult my colleagues by saying that there are significant disadvantages about that, there are not it's what I've dreamed of my whole life to be honest I was saying to colleagues in the room one of the feedbacks from my 2016 programme is that we should be more risky we should take more risks now for those of you that have ever worked with me or seen my programmes you'll know that nobody has ever said to me I should take more risks because I'm generally regarded as being at the extreme edge of risk I take a lot of risks and I can't tell you how happy I am to be in a culture where actually there's an incentive to be riskier to go further and what I'm particularly proud of in Amsterdam is my thanks to the audience of Amsterdam we broke the box office records for the programme this year which most people in the UK would consider to be an insanely risky programme but the people of Amsterdam love risk and thanks to decades of adventure from a Holland festival since 1947 I inherit an atmosphere where I have the artistic freedom the hunger for artistic adventure and the resource so what I would say is everyone else in the world needs to follow this example and come up with the financial base plus the respect for artistic freedom I can't insult you by saying that there's something bad about having money and freedom there's nothing bad everyone should have it there's one question over here I am aware of time so if we could keep it short, thank you I think Andrew Wood San Francisco International Arts Festival and I want to pick up what Pierre just said and try and put it back into another part of the conversation sorry, I think Andrew Wood doesn't try and put it back into another part of the conversation he talked about what's common throughout the world and there's one thing that's common to most places and that's government policy where you live there is a government that has a policy and includes the arts another part of the conversation today was about cultural placemaking which is a government policy another name for cultural placemaking is gentrification or negro removal it is something that the arts are complicit in and that's there as opposed to stand on but the problem is that artists are always or often used as the first steps in removing a population that exists in one place in order to put in a wealthier population in the country that I live in the United States the cultural placemaking policies are driven by corporations and very large foundations are created by wealthy persons and corporations so when you follow the money and see where those intentions are coming from when the output is that communities are removed because of gentrification or artist placemaking you have to wonder where the artists stand in that and are they deliberate carpet baggers or are they going to stand up and defend their own communities so that's just the question that I'm going to put back well I have to say I think that's quite a cynical view quite draconian these things happen I'm not sure it's necessarily common artist experience and there are ways of mitigating it but I'll hand it over to and in Britain as well it absolutely does happen and it is a I think it is a it is actually both governments at national level and at city level and of course property developers do use artists as a way to increase the value of a particular part of their country or of their city there's no doubt about that but I also think just to push back for a minute I'll finish in a second then over to you I also think that it is important to respect the fact that there are artists from all parts of the world who do feel passionate about the need to communicate and share the concerns of the place where they live and who do are happy to align with their own country I lived and worked in Scotland at a time when Scotland got its own parliament and there was an enormous artistic energy which I don't believe was cynical or was about making house prices go up but it was about wanting to express and explore and share what contemporary Scotland was about and I think that is an important energy for artists and it is the energy that says can we have artists that tell the stories that are real stories, not just bad news stories but are about the reality of contemporary life and complexities that's a really important thing for those of us that are working in the arts to support those artists I'd like to take two questions there's a question here, one other question No, I just want two words I think that I have an incredible opportunity to be here My name is Katie Dorlydzia I'm from the Georgian International Festival of Arts artistic director here are people who created our incredible festival in 1997 in the country which was torn by war we began it in 88 Rob Brooklyn is here David Blankey was the incredible man who passed away, unfortunately young scobby and these incredible people and William Bardecourt created this incredible festival for us I'm here presenting one of the Georgian best theatres I think to Manishwini Film Actors Theatre who presents Streetcar named desire at the Roxy Central and we will be very happy to invite you all but what I wanted to say and what is very much why I came here because the international community of festivals the friendship is very important because our festival because of my opposition activity in 2009 was closed because I was in opposition and God bless everything is finished we have a very good government in 2012 we are back to our country I think so and the festival is back in time the support of my international community friends from the other festivals were incredible it was Rob Brooklyn it was all others it was William Bardecourt who kept this festival alive even it came back after five years and this is very important every country from Africa till Samo Islands we have to be one community and we have to know our needs how I came here and I finished we didn't have money and our minister of culture which I think will go after elections in October he will do his festival he makes very much just festival and this is only his you know I think he told us we don't yes we don't have money so we cut a little bit budget of the gift festival and we came here to bring our production because our existence at the wonderful Edinburgh festival was more important thank you very much and welcome to George I have a question of gentrification and money because I think it's a really important one I think especially because in terms of from a position of privilege in terms of having all of these different stakeholders but I do think one of the things that one is constantly managing is to put together this you have to have a broad church of interests and different people are involved and investing for very different reasons so as you say some people might be about gentrification of a neighbourhood another might be about tourism another might be about health in terms of government policy it's coming from all of these different areas and I think in the UK we went through a process of having to justify ourselves through all of these byproducts what we do in a sense but in a sense that comes back to us and it's stakeholder management and making sure the tail doesn't wag the dog and so I mean of course you have to be careful if you're dealing with big corporations and investment and you're dealing with governments that aren't interested in the arc but they're interested in other outcomes that management is our job and any of those stakeholders I think can take on an importance that is disproportionate but that does come back to us but we still need stakeholders and we still need sponsors and we still need donors and even if some of their motivations are completely different to us I think it comes back to us and that question of stakeholder management and through really great governance I think is something that's a little dull but it's absolutely critical I have to stop it now please can you continue the conversation afterwards I'm terribly sorry now I've got a forest of hands up which I didn't know before I'd like to wrap this up thank everybody thank you the artists here the team Mary Helen Young Sophia Victoria and Cassie picked up the threads that came through about the importance of artists led secular non-nation focused festivals that started in 1947 I think we're kind of agreeing that they're even more important now so let's drink to that as it were please go back and enjoy the menu thank you very much thank you