The Science of Success
Source: The Independent
Author Hamish McRae embarked on a project to pinpoint the secrets of human success; those groups and organisations that were capable of succeeding in good times and bad. They are examples of collective human endeavour that are both humbling and inspiring and which he believes have powerful common messages for all of us.
The Festivals of Edinburgh made the list.
A shouted warning for the audience to stand back, and a burst of fire from a human flamethrower surges towards the crowd of onlookers on the Mound. A troupe in silver body-paint hands out leaflets for the night’s performance. Down the High Street, a jazz band bangs out the sounds of New Orleans. For it is August in Edinburgh and the prim grey capital of Scotland is once again home to the largest arts show in the world.
It is an extraordinary, if improbable achievement and one that many other cities would love to emulate. How has Edinburgh done it? The short answer is slowly. This is not one festival but ? depending what you include ? 10. Each reinforces the others, giving the city an artistic critical mass that makes it impossible to topple. There is the original arts festival, organised, like so many others, by the city authorities. There is a jazz and blues festival. There is the book fair, the largest of its kind on the planet. There is a film festival, the longest continually running one in the world. There is a television festival. In 2003, a video games festival joined the clutch. There is the Mela, a celebration of life in the Indian sub-continent, run by Edinburgh’s Asian community. In 2004 the city added a visual art festival for the first time. In a slightly different category from all the rest, there is the Edinburgh Tattoo, where military musicians - again from all over the world - put on a show.
But Edinburgh’s special feature, the thing that distinguishes it from every other celebration of artistic endeavour, is the Fringe ? the open access given by the city to the thousands of events that take place in August. Others have tried to copy it. None has really succeeded.
The story, though, offers a lesson for anyone wanting to run an arts event. Back in that drab aftermath of the Second World War, many cities sought to recapture the life and joy of pre-war Europe. In 1946 and 1947 respectively, Avignon and Edinburgh both started arts festivals ? the pattern being the classic one where a group of civil and artistic leaders invite companies to bring their acts, organise venues ? and usually offer subsidies to get them to come. The original Edinburgh International Arts Festival was exactly that. But in the first year something happened that changed Edinburgh and the arts world forever.
Eight groups that had not been invited, six from Scotland and two from England, decided to gatecrash the show. They found their own venues, stumped up their own money and put on a performance. That first Fringe has defined the movement ever since: no performers are invited ? there is complete open access; they use unconventional theatres; and they carry all the financial risks themselves. More came the following year and an Edinburgh journalist pointed out that interesting things were happening on the fringe of the main festival ? and so coined that expression to describe them.
Since then, the Fringe has gradually acquired a modest infrastructure. The first programme to bring the various independent acts under one loose umbrella was put together on the initiative of a local printer in 1954. A box office run by Edinburgh students followed in 1955, and the Festival Fringe Society in 1958. The event became famous across the UK in 1960 after the success of the comedy show Beyond the Fringe, but the first full-time paid employee was not appointed until 1969.
The Fringe raced on, getting into the Guinness Book of Records as the globe’s largest arts festival in 1992. In 2009, an estimated 19,000 performers took part in more than 34,000 performances at more than 2,000 shows in 265 venues. The event generated £75m for the economy. Those figures beat all records by a huge margin. But how? Once the Fringe was established as the premier showcase for British, later world, theatrical talent, it was natural that Edinburgh in August should attract other festivals too. The market was largely ready-made: people who are interested in new experimental theatre are probably also interested in more conventional drama, in classical music and jazz, in new books in all the other experiences that Edinburgh offers.
For a young performer to get noticed at Edinburgh can be a life-changing experience. Win one of the top awards and nothing will ever be the same again. And for the more mature critics and impresarios, as well as the ordinary punters, it is “the chance to see it before it happens”.
Edinburgh has long had a lot of things going for it. It is, physically, the most beautiful city in Britain, with its castle, its gardens, its medieval Old Town and its Georgian squares. It is a capital city and important in the entertainment world an English-speaking one. But none of this, of course, would have been enough. There are at least three special features about the Edinburgh Festival that carry a message for other cities seeking to develop their own special face to the world.
Lesson one is the willingness to create and permit a completely open marketplace. This means accepting that what happens cannot be controlled. Edinburgh has tended this marketplace wisely, not by piling in huge amounts of money or building infrastructure, but rather by clearing bureaucratic blockages that might stifle it. For example, one of the keys to the Fringe’s success is the use of unconventional performance spaces, often in old buildings designed for another purpose. That means applying sensitive fire and access regulations to make sure audiences really are safe rather than insisting that venues should fit box-ticking requirements.
It also means accepting that the city will, for one month, be a quite different place from what it is during the rest of the year. Residents and businesses alike in effect lose control of the centre of their city. Were it badly managed, the disruption could damage the core activities that drive the city through the rest of the year. All tourist centres have to cope to some extent with surges of visitors with different values to the locals, but this is extreme stuff. The lesson therefore is not just to permit the creation of a market but also to relish it.
Lesson two is to blend top-down and bottom-up. There is no single mind planning what happens in Edinburgh; there are and always have been lots of minds, which work in different ways.
Some of these, such as the director and governing body of the International Festival, have to exert a top-down discipline. The companies performing have to be invited. Funding has to be found, venues secured and the events publicised. To get the right mix, there has to be some artistic direction.
At the Fringe, by contrast, the minds have to focus almost exclusively on logistics. They do not concern themselves about the artistic merit of the performers; all they have to do is make sure that anyone who fills the basic requirements is able to set up a show, for this is entirely a bottom-up exercise. There is, however, one crucial function that the Fringe performs beyond logistics. This is teaching.
Every year it holds a series of seminars to show would-be performers and promoters how to put on a show. These include: how much the different venues will cost; how to manage publicity; the timescale for decisions; the need to go for as long a run as possible to cover costs, and so on.
The trick, which the various organisers of the Edinburgh festivals have managed to pull off, is to achieve balance to plan but not to over-plan, to lead but also to follow the demands of the market. That leads to the third lesson: the need to listen. This has been central to Edinburgh’s development at three stages.
First, what started as a conventional arts festival, and might have remained so, was swiftly transformed by the demands of the market into something much bigger. Second, in the middle years, Edinburgh allowed market forces to develop the Fringe, rather than trying to stifle it.
Third, whenever a new festival wanted to tag along, it was welcomed. So films and TV, jazz and books were all grafted onto the official and Fringe core. Edinburgh creates a platform not just where people can feel free to experiment but also one where they do not need to worry if it does not work. There is surely a wider message there: individual failure is an essential part of the wider success of almost all enterprises and absolutely essential to a venture as huge and amorphous as the Edinburgh Festival.
