Ian Ritchie believes that the City of London Festival’s success over 50 years is based on taking programming risks and exploring creative partnerships.
The City of London Festival was founded in 1962 with the clear aims of revealing the inspirational and beautiful aspects of the City, so easily eclipsed by its reputation as a financial centre, and providing cultural opportunities for its multitude of workers to find a better balance in their daily lives. In other words, the festival was deemed to be essential to the wellbeing of the individual as well as the City. The inaugural nine-day programme included the premières of seven new works, sitting alongside more familiar repertoire, and emerging artists rubbed shoulders with international stars. The festival thus reflected the very nature of the City of London itself – continuity and renewal – and captured that ‘sense of place’ which is vital for all meaningful festivals. Our fortunes and reputation have risen and fallen over the past 50 years but our identity has remained fundamentally the same, inextricably linked with the City’s unique buildings and open spaces brought to life with artistic activity each summer.
Having first arrived as Artistic Director thirty years ago, I returned as Festival Director in 2005, intent on drawing upon my wider experiences and interests and not just producing tasty artistic dishes. I faced an immediate funding crisis when the City of London Corporation announced a significant reduction in its core support. It remained strongly supportive nonetheless and standstill funding was agreed instead. Cuts themselves were deferred until last year and the current situation has been compounded by drastic reductions in commercial sponsorship. So how have we coped and why are we still here today? There are two related reasons: programming and partnership.
All my programmes leading up to 2012 took the theme of ‘Trading places’, reflecting both the City’s global commercial links and the festival’s international cultural connections. The artistic dividends from collaborating and curating with different parts of the world have been substantial, further enriched by the stimulation of local audiences and the support of international partners through businesses and embassies. For five years we have also sustained an environmental theme: in 2009 we addressed sustainability and the impact of climate change on London and our Nordic and Baltic partners; we concentrated on bees in 2010; birds the following year; flowers last summer; and in 2013 we shall attend to trees.
In nervous economic times, a populist approach to programming has to be resisted and the myth that new work is off-putting must be exploded. Fifty living composers were represented in our fiftieth anniversary festival last summer and yet we broke attendance records, while London’s public had more attractions and distractions to choose from than ever before. The festival has thrived, in spite of a recession in the public and private sectors, by taking artistic risks and remaining topical and different. As an occasional client of Arts Council England (ACE), we have secured project funding for commissioning and producing various new works and developing programmes around them, including a project for music and disability last year. Welcoming our particular curatorial approach to creating interdisciplinary programmes, ACE awarded us substantial funding for 2010 and 2011from its ‘Sustain’ initiative to replace lost sponsorship; our programming and consequent sustenance saved us from going under.
Collaboration is the other major factor in our successful existence. Partnership can help one to endure difficult conditions, as resources, risks and markets are shared, precisely because one becomes two or more. But partnerships are artistically beneficial in any circumstances: fine programmes are born of creative intercourse. The 2013 festival, which marks the 400th anniversary of the City of London’s relationship with Derry-Londonderry, the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Utrecht, and the centenary of the pacifist composer Benjamin Britten, among others, will be woven from the thematic threads of ‘Conflict and resolution’ and the fruit of the loom of many partnerships. We shall explore the musical brain and music’s therapeutic role in treating the consequences of trauma in the theatres of war, realising that people have only just begun to understand its extraordinary powers, which perhaps transcend all the other arts.
The festival is no mere entertainment or distraction: and beyond art itself, we can continue to make connections, change perceptions and stimulate wider debate.
Ian Ritchie is Festival Director of the City of London Festival.
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