The Edinburgh Festivals: an endless experiment | Faith Liddell | TEDxUniversityofEdinburgh
how many of you spend most of your time swilling in complexity well that's what we seem to have been doing for the last eight years at festivals edinburgh it's been hard it's been a bit painful it's been frustrating but we've we've learned to find ways of bearing the pain of tolerating the complexity sometimes of swelling in it with optimistic expectation even relish because almost always we find that that quagmire of complexity condenses into something solid that we can recognize together as a foundation to build on or out of its muddy murky sometimes alarming depths just one of us perhaps will find retrieve a pearl of an idea that will give us clarity or will illuminate our future ambition we swill and complexity because it helps us to evolve so who are we this evolving we well that's complex two festivals edinburgh is the organization that was created by the directors of 12 of the 12 major festivals in the city to lead on their joint strategic development and to work collaboratively and with our stakeholders and funders and partners to try to make sure that edinburgh remains and retains its position as the world's leading festival city we are the organization the festivals are the members they're the board of directors they own it i have 12 bosses they are we are the edinburgh international science festival the imaginate festival for children and young people we are the film festival the edinburgh international film festival we are the edinburgh jazz and blues festival we are the edinburgh art festival the edinburgh festival fringe the edinburgh international festival we are the royal edinburgh military tattoo we are also the edinburgh international book festival we are the scottish storytelling festival and we are edinburgh's hogmanay and collectively we have 25 000 artists putting on 3 000 shows a year we have a whole range of impacts but essentially and essentially to all essential to all of those impacts social cultural economic is the fact that these festivals retain their own distinct powerful visions and identities they are complex they have their ecosystems of artists and producers of audiences of funders of communities they have their own organizational cultures they have their own their own businesses their own business structures they operate on completely different scales some of them have two staff some of them have 30 and importantly they are driven and they are led by very ambitious competitive challenging wonderful uh thinkers creative thinkers and programmers essential though to their success and their ability to continue to survive through what have been very challenging times over the last eight years was their decision to come together to work together to keep company with each other to collaborate and of course that involves swelling and complexity in experimenting together um that experiment has taken a whole series of different forms but essentially what matters as much as the festivals carrying that experiment is where it takes place because our compact historical city is the unique petri dish in which our festival culture has grown the edinburgh international festival was created in the wake of the second world war in 1947 as a way of bringing the countries of europe and the world together through culture in response to some of that devastation of that terrible conflict and it from its very first moment it it was both a bold a brave international venture and also a committed civic enterprise it was about bringing the best of culture to the city but it was also unusually at that time an initiative to bring tourists into edinburgh it was about bringing the greatest artists in the world into the grand civic spaces the theaters and the concert halls of the city and also about the the cultural values associated with that but it was immediately disrupted and enhanced by two acts of revolution of rebellion when eight theatre companies who were not invited to the edinburgh international festival decided that they were going to come anyway they knew there would be artists they knew there would be audiences and they came and started to take up their places in alternative spaces in the city and started to turn into what was to become the edinburgh festival fringe now the largest arts festival in the world and then another revolution was the edinburgh international film festival they wanted to bring film into the city at this time an art form that was not part of the international festival either and then following fast a after these festivals marching fast on the hills in fact of these first three festivals the edinburgh the royal edinburgh military tattoo and then over the last 69 years we have another eight major festivals that have grown up in a in the city um but these festivals again what has been essential is the ability of the city to adapt to these festivals the city has welcomed them it's accepted the complexity and in fact the tensions that they represent when they sit here together the idea of a festival as a vehicle for city marketing and branding has become very fashionable over the last 15 years but what happens in edinburgh couldn't happen anywhere else in the world you cannot buy what happens here off the peg as joyce macmillan one of our fabulous cultural commentators here has said the story of the birth of edinburgh as a festival city an experiment with unintended consequences is all about the essential unpredictable energy that emerges from boldness and also about our cities our city's ability not just to fund and support not that we mind those things but actually to adapt to that essential energy and that has been part of a long slow process that has been instrumental in transforming edinburgh into a a world city once again now festivals edinburgh is the next stage in that process in that in that evolution um as the organization created by the 12 directors to lead on their joint development we feel like we're in an endless experiment a never-ending experiment on ourselves as cultural festivals uh on on us as organizations on us as individuals and our artists and our audience and the city that we inhabit and animate and the idea of an experiment well it's a comfort to us actually it allows us to be more open to exploration it allows us to be more tolerant of our own failures and those of others the failures and fault lines that we we encounter in each other it allows us to invest in and to feel passionate about an idea or a project but then also to release it um it it also continues to be a discomfort to us as well and we have to remember that a lot of it is about readjustment and our analysis and redefinition sometimes it is excruciatingly slow we collaborate we swell in complexity and we continue to evolve um one of the unintended uh one of the things about festivals edinburgh and its creation is that it also has unintended consequences we've come together and we've worked on those things that we needed to in order to retain that position as a world-leading festival city even in some cases i would say to survive over the last few challenging years so we've worked in areas like uh marketing and we have created collaborative cross festival working groups in marketing and in program investment um and we've brought together members of every single festival so representatives from each each festival's voice is heard whether they have two staff or they have 30 staff and they contribute to our thinking and how we develop our strategies and all of the work that we do um but we also then have a director of each festival or a chief executive cheering those groups and feeding back into our board we've also created groups and then abandoned them either because they're not focused they don't have a clear purpose anymore or sometimes because they're just downright dysfunctional but wonderfully we've also gone into areas we didn't expect to we've created working groups collaborative working groups across our festival in environmental sustainability we've created new ways of working together around innovation because collaborative working is addictive we found and it's also infectious our stakeholders and funders have also found new ways of working with us they've they've invested in us as a source of experimentation we're like a research and development function for some of the work that we've done painful though that is sometimes and they've also pulled their resources in ways that they've never done before in order to support ambition to allow us to stretch and they've started to work together among themselves as a result of some of the projects and that they've worked with us on they have been part of the experiment as well and they've also shared the pain because there has been pain the waiting and the waiting and the waiting for what i discovered in a design process is called the surviving idea to emerge and of course we don't just wait collaboration is difficult you know and there are there are clashes of ambition there are incompatibilities of resource there are very strongly long-held opinions there are periods of sporadic fear and risk aversion there are debates about um what what does fairness mean what is fairness what is fear for one is not necessarily fear for another i'm making funny noises is it my hair um so yeah so we also have to deal with this idea of fairness and of course competitiveness and we don't want to repress that that's also what they're all about and so we have to find we've had to um to create sometimes and then to adopt ways of navigating this complexity again ways of firming up a combined understanding a and agreement um we debate we debate rigorously as you can imagine with those very strong creative individuals we do not make decisions uh by majority we make them by consensus that means any single festival can veto an idea or a process or a project at any stage but because they know they can they don't they stay with it for longer they explore for longer sometimes when we have a new idea or a new collaborative working group we'll put the festival that's innovating in that field in charge sometimes we will put the questioner because in questioning and questioning matters as well they will be involved in working with their with their colleagues to answer those questions to bring up more and to answer those as well we um we research and we audit we have to try and get external objective perspectives because we want to swill in complexity but not just in opinions and then we pilot and we prototype because we want to test out and adapt before we roll out we're constantly trying to assess acceptability and a and deliver deliverability um and of course we jettison we have to jettison things sometimes as well to make ourselves lighter and almost always it takes at least a year for us to get to a place where we have something that is acceptable that is trusted that's embraceable that's achievable and when we get there together that idea is not just okay but is solid and bright and good and good not just for us but for the wider ecologies to which we connect and on which we depend thank you very much for swilling in some of this complexity with me i hope it's also been good for you