Traveller: Jonathan Mills promises to take audiences on a journey
THE Edinburgh International Festival was conceived as an antidote to war. From today's perspective, its aims sound terribly high-minded. In the inaugural year of 1947, Edinburgh's Lord Provost said he hoped visitors would "find in all the performances a sense of peace and inspiration with which to refresh their souls and reaffirm their belief in things other than material".
Today, when festivals are 10 a penny and the privations of the Second World War a distant memory, the provost's faith in the power of the arts seems quaintly idealistic. Yet it is only right that artistic director Jonathan Mills should have revisited those founding principles in building his programme for 2008.
A man keenly aware of the legacy he inherited when he came into the post in September 2006, the 44-year-old Australian is not content with simply packaging a few shows together. For him, a festival needs to have some bigger purpose, whether it is to bring "peace and inspiration" or to help us break free of the daily grind with three weeks of bacchanalian excess.
"I do believe festivals are about taking people on a journey," says Mills, whose calling card in 2007 was a programme that linked Monteverdi's pioneering L'Orfeo to the most daring music-theatre collaborations of our own era, weaving a labyrinthine thread about classical myths on the way. The journey he wants to take us on this year is on a theme of borders, in particular the dividing lines between the nation states of an ever-changing Europe.
"We want to draw people's attention to the fact that the European Community has expanded significantly," says Mills, sitting in his top-floor office near Edinburgh Castle. "What was a community of 16 nations is now a community of 27 nations, with a population of close to half a billion people and a geographic spread from Estonia to Cyprus. It's a very interesting phenomenon in light of this festival's history because we emerged from the circumstances of the end of the Second World War to answer a deep need to find a sense of optimism and community at a time when the borders of Europe were carefully redrawn. Those borders have been largely dismantled and the cultures that are part of this mix have diversified."
The theme is not all-consuming. Some performances, such as the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra playing Ravel, Berlioz and Copland, are there purely because of their excellence. But the theme is substantial enough to have its presence felt, explicitly or implicitly, throughout the event.
We find it in the classical music programme in the form of the border-straddling gypsy music being played by the Budapest Festival Orchestra, commissioned by the EIF, alongside its more familiar repertoire of Liszt and Brahms. There are resonances in the performance of Éclairs sur L'Au-delà by Olivier Messiaen, a composer much associated with the war thanks to the quartet he wrote while interned in a German prison camp in 1940. Most exotically, it's there in Song And Civilisation in Greyfriars Kirk which takes us to Turkey, Lebanon, the Balkans, Corsica and Georgia for a series of haunting vocal performances.
The return of Scottish Opera to the EIF will be welcomed by many, and it too is contributing to the theme. Its production of The Two Widows is by Bedrich Smetana, a composer born in Bohemia when it was part of the Austrian empire and who consciously drew on Czech themes in his music. Elsewhere, the well-travelled Karol Szymanowski is represented with the little seen Krol Roger, a border-crossing collaboration between St Petersburg's Mariinsky theatre and a composer with deep roots in Poland's folk music. "These are juxtapositions that an arts festival can deal with," says Mills.
Similarly, theatre productions include The Dybbuk, drawn from the folklore of the borderless Jewish people, performed by Poland's TR Warszawa. "Poland was one side of the border and is now the other side," says Mills. "It is still the border. It is still that European Union frontier. It's now in the club whereas it was outside, so what does that tell us about Europe?"
The dance programme includes a visit from the State Ballet of Georgia, which prompts Mills to make head-turning historical connections. "Balanchine was Georgian," he says. "What better argument for Georgia's part in that great tradition of ballet do you need? Kylian was Czech. The people we think of as the inheritors of the tradition of western Europe were born in those places."
When Mills is at his most liberal in his definition of borders, the programme gets more tantalising still. "A border is not just defined by what is contained within it, but also what is outside it," he says, justifying a strand of work from the Middle East. It's a region poorly represented in previous festivals and in need of our understanding. We should expect our cultural perceptions to be shifted by Jidariyya, a poetic meditation on life and death by the National Theatre of Palestine, and a filmed performance of a traditional Iranian Tazieh, an epic form of sung storytelling.
"Jidariyya is a play about having the language to say you belong somewhere," says Mills. "This is a very lyrical, beautiful, gentle piece and not the kind of work you would imagine from the National Theatre of Palestine. It's not dripping with anger, but searching for poetry."
Borders can be metaphorical as well as physical and at least two productions take us over the line between sanity and madness. TR Warszawa's brilliant, harrowing production of Sarah Kane's suicidal 4:48 Psychosis and Barrie Kosky's music-driven adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. And in 365, the National Theatre of Scotland's Vicky Featherstone and playwright David Harrower will be walking the border between adolescence and adulthood, dependence and responsibility, in a play about teenagers being released from state care.
"We are arguing about psychological, cultural and spiritual borders," says Mills. "It's also about the contrast between Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The presence of the Batsheva Dance Company from Israel, the Whirling Dervishes from Turkey, the National Theatre of Palestine all give an indication of this kind of thinking."
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Edinburgh International Festival (0131-473 2000), August 8-31 •
www.eif.co.ukFestival highlightsDANCEMATTHEW BOURNE'S NEW ADVENTURES OF DORIAN GRAY
In today's celebrity-obsessed world what could be more apt for a revamp than Oscar Wilde's deliciously dark study of decadence and vanity?
King's Theatre, August 22-30 (except the 25), 8pm, August 23 and 30, 2.30pm
THEATRE4.48 PSYCHOSIS
Sarah Kane's last play, once described as a 75-minute suicide note, is translated into Polish almost a decade after her death.
King's Theatre, Aug 15-17, 8pm
I WENT TO THE HOUSE BUT DID NOT ENTER
Exploring works by TS Eliot, Maurice Blanchot and Samuel Beckett, award-laden veteran Heiner Goebbels delivers a world premiere.
The Lyceum, Aug 28-30, 8pm
MUSICGABRIELA MONTERO
Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero, below, will perform an improvisational extravaganza, followed later in the day by a programme of Bach, Chopin and Debussy.
Queen's Hall, August 12, 11am; The Hub, August 12, 10.30pm
OPERATHE TWO WIDOWS
Co-produced by Scottish Opera and EIF, Bedrich Smetana's comedy is set in the slow-paced Czech countryside of the 1800s.
Edinburgh Festival Theatre, August 9, 11 and 12, 7.15pm
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