Arts Festivals Summit Edinburgh Portrait
Discover the 2025 Arts Festivals Summit through the eyes and words of poet and writer Simon Mundy. You'll see the Summit from a whole new angle, one that we hope will make you smile and laugh.
As the resident Scot on the EFA team, the Arts Festivals Summit in Edinburgh gave me a welcome chance to explain the subtleties of Scotch whisky to any delegate unlucky enough to pause next to me. I explained the differences between peaty Islay malts, the lighter Speyside and Lowland varieties and the in-between ones from the North Highlands where I live. It seemed strange to me that my audience's eyes seemed to glaze over before they had even tasted a dram. Not that they had much of a chance. EFA kept them working or entertained well into the night and the one session when there looked like a real chance for cultural comparisons – the workshop for music festivals – turned out to be like a mirage in the desert. It was held in the Scotch Whisky Experience tasting rooms but all the bottles were locked away firmly behind glass doors.
It is true that Quiz Night gave ample opportunity but it was held upstairs in an Irish bar near Haymarket, where they put an 'e' (and sacriligious ice) in whiskey. Sadly the suggestion that our host in Galway from three years ago, the ever-generous Colm Croffy (Association of Irish Festival Events - AOIFE), should pick up the bill for us was met with a polite but firm refusal. The quiz itself, however, set by Tamar Bruggemann (Wonderfeel) and Peter Florence (European Festivals Forest), was a great success. My table (two Scots, a Czech, two Slovakians, a Belgian and an occasional German) did very well early on but fell at the final fence, failing to identify two cheeses as Hungarian and Polish. The second prize was a chocolate rabbit. One chocolate rabbit does not make a substantial bite when divided into seven pieces.
The real work was done in the (EIF) Edinburgh International Festival's Hub, the restored assembly hall for the Church of Scotland, its interior designed by Pugin who also designed the inside of the Houses of Parliament in London. It is the tallest building in Edinburgh and sits at the top of the Lawnmarket, just below the castle itself. Quite why the street is called the Lawnmarket is baffling. It is precipitously steep and made of massive cobblestones – not a blade of grass in sight. After it had been derelict for a decade and a half, the Hub was opened by Queen Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, in 1999 and it easily soaked up the more than 200 participants that EFA threw into it.
The Summit and The Hub lived up to their names, in geography and conference reality. Geographically the building stands close to the summit of the Royal Mile in the Old Town, the long hill that links the main institutions of the Scottish capital. The military castle covers the top of the volcanic plug that dominates the city. At the bottom of the hill are Holyrood Palace, the King's pad when he visits, and the Scottish Parliament. Halfway up are St. Giles Cathedral and the City Chambers.
The Lord Provost – what a grand name and so much better than Mayor (not Major, with a hard 'j' as some mistakenly call them, mixing up a city boss and a minor officer's rank in the army) – did us proud in the reception in the City Chambers. We hung our coats in the small room where the city council holds its less grand meetings, with the Lord Provost's high backed chair far larger than any others around the leather topped table. We paraded through to the bigger assembly room: large but less deliberately vast than many similar chambers in European cities with much less to glorify than Edinburgh. Size isn't everything.
Once the Lord Provost, the man with the golden chain on his shoulders (we don't know much in this country but we do know how to dress up), had welcomed us to his chambers and wine, our other host, EIF Director Nicola Benedetti, outclassed anyone who spoke then or for the rest of the conference. She talked about the 'disintegration of policy and integrity' around the world but not in Edinburgh – not on her watch, she implied. Instead there was integrity 'in the air of every performance... a continuous reminder of what it is to serve'. 'A civic,' she nodded at the Lord Provost who looked a little like a pupil listening to his scary teacher, 'and moral duty.' Nicola, probably (sorry Mario Hossen, wonderful though you are) the greatest violinist since Menuhin to direct a festival, then played Auld Lang Syne, that Ayrshire song that gets mangled every New Year as midnight is chimed. She, though, played it in a solo violin arrangement so complicated and full of counterpoint that those wanting to sing along were soon totally lost. They stopped humming and just listened in awe. The next morning Nicola continued her homily, urging us all towards 'enlightened humanism' and to 'come down from a tribal mindset to the mythical maturity of the arts.' I quite agree but I'd rather the arts be legendary than mythical. She then flew off to New York to prove the point in Carnegie Hall.
The summit went about its business with its usual enthusiasm; the hall full enough to suggest that not too many had abandoned it for sightseeing or whispered conclaves (after this last week I have papal terminology on the brain). There was even good attendance at the lunchtime sessions where random supplicants ask colleagues for co-operative partnerships. The second one was more random than usual, thanks to one petitioner being moved to the previous day and another being stranded in Spain as all the lights and everything electric refused to function all over the country. We all had pet theories about who to blame. Our colleague from Barcelona was replaced by the eminent director of Jazzfest Berlin, Nadin Deventer, who happens to be the sister of our esteemed EFA Grand Vizier, Kathrin Deventer. There followed one of those profound but silent battles as Kathrin tried to keep her sister to exact time and Nadin showed all of the film she had edited specially. I won't say who won. Let's call it a score draw.
On the final night of the summit we all trooped down the hill to the elegant National Gallery of Scotland and marvelled at its treasures, its fine Rembrandts and just as fine and revolutionary works by the home grown Henry Raeburn (1756-1823), himself the exemplar of that enlightened humanism that Nicola had urged us to adopt. In front of the two best Raeburns in the gallery, EFA's President (soon to be re-elected), Jan Briers, introduced Scotland's Cabinet Secretary (we don't call them Ministers: that title is kept for the church) for culture, Angus Robertson. He also hopes to be re-elected soon. The Scottish Government does not control as much of the nation's policy as it would like – a great deal is held in the hands of the UK Government – but it does control culture. Mr. Robertson, a veteran politician, was given a warmer reception than such figures usually receive from people in the arts – but then he had (against all the odds and unlike an awful lot of European governments this year) increased the cultural budget by GBP 34m, with the promise of much the same next year, 7% over the two years. These days that is munificent. OK, the rest of Europe. No more jokes about parsimonious Scots. Shape up!
By Simon Mundy