— read write play

Alongside an enviably long list of current projects, Andy Field mentions that the Forest Fringe is still looking for people with good (read: interesting, adventurous, delicate, experimental, risky) ideas for the festival in August. As he’s previously explained at length, the Forest Fringe is intended to be a space for low to no-risk experimentation:

We’re not going to be part of the official fringe. We’re not going to charge artists anything to perform. All shows are going to be ‘pay what you can’.

We’re going to have to a wonderful mix of established fringe veterans and younger artists who’ve never performed at the venue before. No one is going to have more than a couple of performances. Everyone is going to have ample rehearsal time.

Everyone is going to be asked to give some of their time back to the place, either by staffing the bar or Front of House or by mentoring a younger artist – just spending a couple of hours watching their show and then talking to them about it.

Fringe veterans may immediately recgonise the irony of the idea of the “official fringe” – and how quickly performers and companies internalise and rationalise the artistic and financial commitments that go with it.

While I have a few questions about the rationale of staging this particular philosophy in Edinburgh in August solely during the festival season – is this just about the contrast? – I’m up for anything that offers an alternative to the “speed-dating equivalent of theatre” that marks many Fringe experiences.

Back in the UK and working on a research seminar for next week – Rehearsing Utopia and Planning Disaster: new directions in collaborative performance. If anything at all, I give good title.

If you’re around Glasgow next week on Tuesday, give me a shout. I should (in time) be putting chunks of my presentation up here, though I’m caught between the traditional need to protect my publishable research and my web 2.0 desire to get everything into the public domain where the argument can continue as soon as possible.

The programme for the 2008 Edinburgh International Festival is out, [correction: it's a teaser story. The programme launches in full on April 7] the second produced by relative newcomer Jonathan Mills, and with a theatre line-up including 4.48 Psychosis (staged by Poland’s TR Warszawa) and a new work by the National Theatre of Scotland. The Guardian has a write up here, with a discrete recognition of the festival’s recent financially interesting times:

Mills said that the festival had broken even last year, but was still carrying a £200,000 accumulated deficit. Its public funding has been raised by £600,000 this year. “We have communicated very clearly with the government and they have acknowledged that what we need to fulfil the very high expectations of the festival comes at an international price,” said Mills.

In the recent past, the way in which that price is negotiated is one of the primary tasks of the festival director – staging Wagner’s Ring cycle in 2003 (with the similarly financially troubled Scottish Opera) was a truly international project, in scale and quality, but it came with an appropriately global price tag.

Then there’s the demand of balancing whatever income you can generate from ticket sales with the requirement for widening access via cheap seats that’s one of the strings tied to public funding – the majority of which comes via grants from Edinburgh Council. So, that’s a job based in the recreational juggling of snowflakes in hell, then.

Spent the day in the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art – kept finding myself back in the Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective, and his sculptural building cuts – shapes and slices carved out of abandoned buildings.

More than anything else, it reminds me of Rachel Whiteread‘s 1993 sculpture House, a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house, but there’s something else, something oddly alien or distant about the seemingly familiar materials Matta-Clark excavated.

The collection is presented primarily through Matta-Clark’s photographs, and selected installations of removed building segments. The problem there, though, is that I wanted to be able to enter the actual spaces and take control of the sight-lines myself; perhaps the denial (or specific shaping) of sight is part of the point of the work, but I’m not sure you can get an idea of what you’re missing until you’ve seen it disappear from view.

Granted, we’re dealing with art-works, or buildings, that don’t exist any more, but the way in which they’re invoked here has the quality of shifting the focus away from the voids to the shapes removed from those spaces – and I’m not sure if that was an intention of the curation or not.

Still, most definitely worth a visit if you’re in the city, and that probably only means you, Dan. (The Alexander Calder mobiles are also great – and the best lit thing in the building.)