Festivals as an expression of culture.
Introduction.
At the very last, festivals should be fun. If they're educational, inspirational, good for commerce and the common good but are not fun, sponsors are wasting their sponsorship dollars.
Ideally, a good festival leaves you breathless. It is inspiring enough to make you simultaneously laugh and cry, educational enough to give you insight into yourself and others, and seductive enought to bring you back again to meet, greet and enjoy performances you may only see once a year at one of the best parties in town. At lest and at most, a good festival always shows its audience a really, really good time.
The experts who have written articles for "About Festivals..." truly know a lot about producing festivals. They know how to celebrate, how to bring people together, how to program performances that not only take your breath away but leave you weak in the knees. Some of them are old timers who learned to produce on a wing and prayer in the '70s. Most of them are visionaries who willed their events to happen while a greek chorus of nay sayers chanted "It's impossible!" All of them, then and now, are smart, savvy organisers who understand the relationship of planning and publicity to positive results.
New and /or young festival producers would be well advised to take any of the following authors or festival aristocrats out for a dinner seasoned heavily with wisdom. Some of the contributors to "About Festivals..." may be a little out of the loop but in a coma, each could fill a library with How To books on festival production.
Warren Christensen didn't invent the One Man Show but for a brief moment in the time, he owned the franchise. His Garden Theatre Festival (GTF) was the best party in town night after summer night for a full month each year between 1971-1976. Ask anyone who attended the free performances emceed by Paul Linke and the late Will Geer, or audience members who met Father Guido Sarducci, Jackson Browne or the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo for the very first time. Talk to the hundreds of volunteers who drove to Ventura to pick oranges so that every other audience member could drink free orange juice under the stars. They will all tell you they had the time of their life soaking up the GTF art and ambiance! Ask other audience members about their GTF experiences and you will hear tales about seeing theatre and dance companies they had never seen before. Or discovering poets or jazz groups that are now woven into the fabric of the City.
Those summer nights represented the best of times for many of artists who appeared on Barnsdall Park's outdoor stages. For many audience members, the experience was right up there with falling in love for the very first time. As a metter of fact, many artists and audience members did fall in love for the first time at the GardenTheatre Festival. The number of engagements, affairs and weddings that occurred during the GTF defies logic but according to rumour, good times were had by all.