Festival Previews Video Blog

During economic down turns world festivals and other outdoor gatherings tend to suffer.  However an upside to this is that people may choose to explore festivals in their own backyard rather than take the mass transit route abroad.  With five banks crashing today (the Belgian-Dutch Bank, Fortis;  Iceland’s Glitnir Bank; the UK’s Bradford & Bingley; America’s  Wachovia and  Germany’s Mortgage Bank, Hypo Real Estate) and the US currently debating the mother of all bail outs, what does this say for the future of the festival industry throughout the world in the coming year.

This year fifteen festivals were canceled in the UK as a result of the freakish weather and the economic downturn.  Even Norway’s Quart Festival was canceled due to poor ticket sales and filed for bankruptcy.  The Florida Citrus Festival  founded in 1924 was hurt by bad weather and poor ticket sales and this picture looks set to continue.

No matter how may articles you read about the economic downturn, there is still a perplexing conundrum as to why it was allowed to happen.  It’s clear that banks don’t like to be regulated and yet the tried and trusted risk averse model does not make enough money for the banks or its investors.  Creative minds thus set about instituting a period of  wholesale banking and securitisation which began to sweep the world.

In the 196o’s banks began trading in foreign currencies and found this to be a lucrative income stream.  Mass consumerism gathered momentum in the early 1970’s and the world’s resources were increasingly being drawn upon.  Some smart cookie then realised that you could produce Futures in things like interest rates and began trading or betting in these going up and down.  Then along comes another bright cookie and creates Hedges, an investment made to limit loss against the two proceeding products designed for the rich investor.

In June 1974 the privately owned German Herstatt Bank went into liquidation speculating in currencies.  In 1995 Nick Leeson brought about the collapse of the oldest merchant bank speculating on Futures.

It makes you wonder what was to come next… and yet it did… another brilliant idea was the bundling up of mortgages and selling them on to other banks with incorrectly or perhaps fraudulently applied Tripple A Credit Ratings.  The fact that the original banks did not fully vet their mortgage loan applicants reveals the inherent distrust currently experienced between banks.  The banks made mind boggling profits and paid equally mind boggling bonuses to traders on the volume selling of these bundled up mortgage packages.   After offering a free for all on mortgages, some borrowers were not able to meet their loan requirements.  The bank owners of these bundled up mortgages don’t know what’s good and what’s bad and it all became toxic debt!

Yet financial bailouts are more common than we think.  Now the mother of all bailouts is set to nationalise the banking system in the States - what a humiliating turn around for the home of the free market economy. Professor Patrick Honohan’s excellent article in the Irish Times on Friday shows that there is a long history of government bailouts and none of this is that new!

But let’s all look on the bright side, attending festivals is a form of escapism and right now that sounds like a very good idea!

Is the world we live in the ultimate software game managed by the ultimate Software Engineer?   Evolution and Creationism are the ultimate universal big questions out there.

Even at the recent UK Festival of Science, now in it’s 175th year, Professor Michal Reiss, Director of Education at the Royal Society, said that he wanted the biblical readings of creationism to be taught alongside Evolution and biology in schools.  In a broader sense the nomination of Sarah Palin and her sympathetic leanings to Creationism brings cosmic ancestry to the forefront with the timely spawning of Spore!

The Creator of SimCity and The Sims game series, Will Wright has turned his attention to Panspermia, the theory “that microbes transmit life to habitable bodies in space”.  Think of the famous Johnny Appleseed story and you have it!  Spore  shows a comet crashing to earth bringing organic material from space.  The evolution of this hypothesis into a gaming genre presents a new medium to engage the enlightened generation.  Challenging established theories without upsetting religious and evolutionary dogma is going to be fun.

The genius of Wright as a writer of software is his ability to put creative narrative in the hands of his players.  Since the makers of Spore released their Creature Creator programme to generate hype before the game’s scheduled release at the beginning of September 2008, geeky gamers have created a new art form already, Spornography or Sporn which is sweeping the internet.

What it shows, good or bad, is that the creative arts have yet to deliver more…

A trip to the beautiful Emerald Isle takes us to the 2008 Dublin Fringe Festival, one of the world’s largest curated fringe festivals in Europe. Opening today and running for 16 glorious days, September is THE festival month in Dublin.

Known as the city for walkers, talkers, music and architecture, Dublin is a place of great cultural and historical interest.  Little known outside Dublin is the fact that it is the IT Call Centre capital of Europe which employs over 100,000 people.  The city has spawned 12 namesakes in the United States and 6 in Australia!  Truly international reach from its Viking origins.

This year’s Fringe has 12 participating countries from around the globe, with 110 shows featuring cabaret, circus, comedy, theatre, music, dance, workshops and the visual arts. Thirty-six venues from Cafés, Community Centres, Gallaries, Lofts and Amphitheatres to the spectacular Hennessey Spiegeltent will showcase in Dublin’s “Fair City”.

Although weather conditions are moderate with light rain forecast, their packed programme of events kicks into action with gusto.  You can check out some of the performer’s Virtual Flyers.  Each show has a thumbnail on the right hand curtain.  Click the Search button for more information about all of these accomplished performers.

Worth reading is Fringe’s Daily Blog which is written by many of the working and volunteer participants at the Fringe.  If you fancy catching up on reviews of shows you can check out the Irish Theatre Magazine.

Have a great festival Dublin!

Friday saw the resignation of the Edinburgh Fringe Director, Jon Morgan.  He states that he wants to return to producing and presenting.

We probably all know by now that the background to this includes the difficulties with the Fringe box office ticketing system.  Last week saw the announcement that ticket sales for this year’s Fringe were down 10% over last year, the first drop in 8 years.  Obviously other factors were at play such as the Credit Crunch, the Olympics and the very wet weather.  However, the co-located and co-incident Edinburgh International Festival showed a 7% increase in its ticket sales, despite the afore mentioned handicaps, to which it too was subject.  This brings into focus what might have been for the Fringe had the box office run smoothly.

So, a vacancy exists but who would want to take the chalice?  I can’t help but compare this to the dilemma of replacing Gordon Brown as leader of the British Labour Party.  A successor is almost guaranteed to lose the next general election in short order and be dumped themselves.

So where’s the similarity for the next Fringe director?  A decision on which box office system to adopt for next year cannot be made until the end of the Autumn, when a box office system survey, set up by the Fringe Society Board, has issued its findings.  A ticketing expert at the Society’s AGM warned the Board that it was highly unlikely that a new ticketing system could be installed in time for next year’s Fringe on that timescale.  The Chair’s stoic and monosyllabic response attempted to contradict this view - somewhat unconvincingly.  So the danger for the next Fringe Director is that we might see a re-run next year of the box office problems, which could again result in resignations.

Anyone still interested in the vacancy?  CVs at the ready!

Dayve Dean performing at Fringe Sunday during the 2008 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

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