International Links - Finding hidden gems

Luke Dixon reveals how he brings the best of the worlds performance work to share with theatre practitioners in the UK.
Sometimes you just need to make a phone call. Annie Sprinkle is a legend, yet she has not performed in London since an abortive show as a part of the ICA seminal prostitution event in 1976, brought to an early close following a raid from the Vice Squad. I had long wanted to bring her back to London and, with the current interest in sex and sexuality in performance, now felt like the right time. So I gave her a call, and told her the mission behind the International Workshop Festival, an event that does just what it says on the tin brings together artists from around the world to make an annual festival of workshops. Like so many before her, Annie Sprinkle immediately said yes to the invitation to come to London for this years Festival. Even now, 20 years after it was formed by an Arts Council initiative to inform and transform British theatre practice, the Festival remains unique in the world. My job is to find the theatre and dance artists from every corner of the globe who will continue to help fulfil that mission and come to London to run workshops, give demonstrations, work with UK theatre-makers and with each other, to be part of, sustaining the Festival as the Research and Development wing of British performance.

A different approach

Other times programming the Festival is more serendipitous. Festival directors are a small and strange breed who roam the world from one festival to another, grazing on each others programmes and always searching for the next big hit. As a result there is often a sameness about the programming of international festivals, with programmes built around what is currently available on an international touring circuit that extends from the Porto Alegre Em Sena in Brazil to Grahamstown in South Africa, the biggest festivals of their respective continents, and from Tampere in Finland to Auckland in New Zealand, as well as to the more familiar European festivals such as Avignon and Berlin.

The International Workshop Festival has always been different, inviting and encouraging artists to create and inspire new work, to show things that have not been seen in London before, and to reveal little known and unexpected performance cultures from the rich diversity of world performance. My visit to the Tampere Festival was part of the constant travelling that is part of the job. Often the results of that travelling are not immediate in terms of programming. I had lived and worked in South Africa immediately before taking over at the International Workshop Festival in London five years ago and have often returned since. The many friends and colleagues I have made there over the years are providing the inspiration for a major strand in the programme of next years Festival, which will look at the vibrancy of township performance in southern Africa with workshops, demonstrations and shows that will take in everything from gum boot dancing and praise singing to political theatre and performance poetry.

Word of mouth

In 2004 we worked with East London Dance and Greenwich Dance Agency on an ambitious project with the group Kwoto from the Sudan recommended by a colleague who had seen them on a recent visit to Khartoum. Such recommendations from trusted friends are crucial to me in finding programme ideas from the remoter parts of the world whose cultures are little known in London. Bringing Kwoto from Khartoum to London was a major undertaking involving patience, quiet diplomacy, persistence and political support. The visit of this wonderful group and the work they did with young dancers from Greenwich and East London, professional dancers, actors and musicians, and with a group of international directors at Middlesex University remains one of the high points of my five years at the Festival. On the last night of their visit what seemed to be the entire Sudanese community of London turned out in their hundreds to share the work and join the celebrations.

It is one of the wonders of London that this astonishing city contains within it so many diaspora communities from every continent, and every year we seek ways of making contact with them. Last year we worked closely with the Maori community, one of Londons most vibrant diasporas, to create a programme of workshops and performances that celebrated, shared and promoted a culture deeply imbedded in the life of London, if little known to those of us outside of it.

Diversity

Sometimes it is our partners who come up with ideas. It was the Thames Festival who suggested we work with them this year in bringing over the giant processional puppet-makers Snuff Puppets from Melbourne. We have worked closely with our colleagues at Thames Festival to put together three weeks of activity with Snuff this summer that has included a professional practice exchange with the UKs leading celebratory artists, community workshops and a programme for emergent artists and students.

My phone call to Annie Sprinkle in San Francisco bore fruit. More than 30 years after her initial visit to the ICA she is still creating the most provocative of performances. With her partner Elizabeth Stephens, Annie is bringing her Love Art Lab to London as a centre piece of this years Festival. At the Chelsea Theatre there will be a rare opportunity to see Annie and Elizabeth in Exposed: Experiments in Love, Sex Death and Art as well as to take part in a unique workshop created especially for the Festival, Extreme Kissing: The Pleasures, Politics and Art of the Kiss. What with that and Pole Dancing, Sword Dancing, Skipping Tricks, Playwrighting and a week long sleep-over workshop at the Junction in Cambridge with Janice Perry, this years Festival promises to be as free-wheeling as ever.