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From trumpets to tutus and beyond
(The Birmingham Post Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) A good idea shamelessly stolen from Amsterdam's long-running Uit-markt, Birmingham's ArtFest is only two years away from celebrating a decade of free festive fun.
Designed to raise the profile of the city's arts community and future events, the weekend has become a regular feature of the transition from summer to autumn and is claimed to be Britain's biggest free arts festival.
Free, at any rate, to punters who can try a wide range of 30-minute taster performances, spanning everything from opera and ballet to jazz and urban music, visual art to theatre.
For the participating arts organisations, though, there are costs to be met and performers to be paid, in the hope that the investment will bring its reward in increased ticket sales and general public goodwill.
Birmingham Opera Company is a good example of an organisation which threw itself into the ArtsFest spirit with enthusiasm from the beginning. In the first year it actually managed to squeeze a complete opera, Stephen Oliver's A Man of Feeling, into its 30-minute slot on the Rep's main stage.
Since then it has preferred to give tasters of forthcoming productions in a variety of small venues - notably the Flapper & Firkin pub, where one year it was memorably introduced by the landlord, who went on to have a very public row with his wife. It probably only gradually dawned on the audience that the two were actors.
"It's a great opportunity for us to position opera not on the main stage but in a lot of the smaller places," says the company's general manager Jean Nicholson.
"That's what makes it particularly attractive to us. Encouraging people to come and give it a go is part of the bigger ethos of the company. So we like doing the Flapper & Firkin, the little cellar bar in which all aspiring bands in Birmingham begin."
This year soprano Donna Bate-man, accompanied by pianist Stephen Maugham, will sing excerpts from Ariadne auf Naxos and Traviata, BOC's next two projects - though probably not in the baby doll nightgown she memorably wore in the production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide at the now-demolished Chuck Works in East-side a few years ago.
Bateman has become a regular in BOC's shows: "We may not have an opera house but we're building a company here," says Jean Nicholson. "A lot of them are getting big work abroad now."
Though she points out that even filling a 30-minute slot is not as straightforward as people might assume - "I have to pay people to rehearse, I have to pay them to perform, I have to bring them to Birmingham" - the exposure has proved useful in recruiting community performers for the company's shows.
"What is good at ArtsFest is that people are much more prepared to suck it and see, because it's half an hour, it's not half a day, and very often people say how much they've enjoyed it. That's the important thing for us." Like opera, ballet has a barrier of wariness and preconception to overcome with the wider public. When ArtsFest was born Birmingham Royal Ballet had already been resident in the city for eight years, but was probably still regarded as a strange and exotic newcomer by many of the large crowd in Centenary Square.
It's probably still true to say that there is noticeable sense of surprise when the company trails a show far removed from the stereotypical tights-and-tutu look of classical ballet - as may be the case today, when it shows an excerpt from Twyla Tharpe's forthcoming Nine Sinatra Songs (the three songs being showcased are One for My Baby, That's Life and Domani - you'll have to buy a ticket for the Hippodrome performance to see My Way).
"I suppose the first question about ArtsFest is whether it's worth doing," says communications director Keith Longomore.
"For us, definitely. It's one of the few opportunities we have to put the company outside the theatre, something we're always keen to do. Not everybody feels comfortable in a theatre. One of our dilemmas is that, because of the way the company works, the dancers go off all over the world in the summer, then come back towards the end of August.
"That doesn't give us much time to get them match-fit. "In the early days the company was a bit fazed by doing it, but now they just see it as part of what we do."
Weather is a particular problem for ballet because a wet stage is dangerous, and one of last year's performances had to be cancelled for that reason.
"The water was coming in sheets on to the stage," Keith Longmore remembers. "But the weather forecast for this weekend has improved . Originally it was torrential rain from Saturday, but now it's meant to be very good weather."
Have BRB's ArtsFest performances helped bring bigger audiences to the Hippodrome?
"We always try to have an offer available to people and that has usually been well received and well taken up. That's not particularly scientific, but a very positive response. We always seem to draw a good crowd, which is encouraging for the dancers. We want people within Birmingham to feel a civic pride in the company and a sense of ownership, whether or not ballet is their thing."
As well as hosting one of the busiest ArtsFest venues in the CBSO Centre, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has been a regular performer at ArtsFest through the years. Members of the orchestra also feature this weekend in Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's performances of music by Leamington composer Howard Skempton.
The CBSO's appearance has usually been a fixture of the Saturday night programme, but it switched to Sunday night last year. Now that the council has scrapped the long-running Fireworks Fantasia event in Cannon Hill Park, this is the only opportunity to see the orchestra playing out of doors in its home town, and tomorrow night's performance has been tripled in length to an impressive 90 minutes.
"It's basically the same format that we used to do at Fireworks Fantasia," says chief executive Stephen Maddock. "We're playing things that are coming up in the first half of the season, so there'll be Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla, Faure's Pavan, the ending of The Firebird and Bolero."
The man with the baton is Michael Seal, who now combines a career as a violinist in the orchestra with the role of assistant conductor. Having someone with his inside knowledge of the orchestra to call on for this type of event is invaluable, according to Stephen Maddock.
"It's just so good for us because Mike is so versatile - particularly in concerts like this when there is so much to put together.
"It's very helpful to have somebody on hand who can do it, rather than an external maestro who is expecting this to be their big break with the CBSO. Mike is very practical in all these things and he does a very good job."
At a time when classical music is struggling to renew its audience, the CBSO clearly has a lot to gain from informal exposure of the kind offered by ArtsFest.
"The audience seem to enjoy it on nights when it's been better weather. Over the weekend we man a stall as well, and we get a lot of interest from people who aren't regular attenders. Sales tend to be growing each week during September so it's not easy to see what's directly attributable to Artsfest.
"The PR benefit of Fireworks Fantasia was great because it was an opportunity to play to an audience of 20,000, but the couple of years when we combined ArtsFest with Proms in the Park felt every bit as good as Cannon Hill Park in terms of reaching a really big audience.
"There have been one or two years when it's been really wet and damp, and that's always disappointing because orchestras like playing to full houses wherever it is. But if the weather is good and we have a good crowd we enjoy it." It's not just the performing arts that feature at ArtsFest. The visual arts village provides a focus for the city's art galleries and the Barber Institute has always drawn big crowds with its imaginative dramatisations based on paintings in the collection.
"We have a marquee - this year it's in Oozells Square - and we present some of the Art Alive performances we do at the Barber where we bring to life artists from the past, using actors and scripts relating to our paintings," says education officer Brian Scholes. "This year it's slightly different because we have two actors this time and they are playing clowning cousins instead of focusing on one painting. We have copies of a variety of paintings and the clowns will tell the stories. There's a lot of emphasis on storytelling and it's obviously aimed at children and families."
For much of its history the university-based collection adopted a low profile, and the wider public was never really positively encouraged until the present director, Richard Verdi, arrived at the beginning of the 1990s. Does this mean there is still a lack of awareness of the collection's existence among the ArtsFest crowds?
"To some degree, but that's less and less now, and I think ArtsFest has probably helped with that," says Brian Scholes.
"In the seven years I've been here I would say that's changed. I think most people know about the Barber now even if they haven't been, and the education programme has just snowballed,
"We usually get full houses. It's quite a lively event and there's quite a lot of audience participation.
"It's usually a very positive reaction we get and it does translate into people coming to the gallery.
"In the past I've had head teachers come up to me at ArtsFest and ask us to go to their schools. We have a programme called Art Reach whereby we go out to schools.
"We do try to target schools that wouldn't come to the Barber, and we don't expect them to pay for it. So ArtsFest is like a snapshot of what we do."
Copyright 2006 Birmingham Post & Mail Ltd.
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