European Festivals Summit focuses on the need for peace

This year's European Festivals Summit alternated between the celebratory and the sombre. It was hosted by the Usedom Festival on the island of that name just off the Baltic coast of Germany, and the neighbouring Polish island of Wolin, at the mouth of the River Oder. These days the two islands are demure holiday resorts with pleasant (if chilly) beaches and wooded countryside, part of the ancient region of Pomerania. Usedom has a gruesome past, though. At its tip, in Peenemünde, the Nazi regime established its rocket research centre, led by Walther von Braun, serviced not just by military scientists but by its own concentration camp. In 1942 the first rocket to reach space was fired from there. The establishment went on to develop the V2 missile that devastated London at the end of WWII.

Not much is left: a few rusting gantries. The rest was demolished by the Soviet forces as they created East Germany – all except the massive power station, its office block and assembly hall. In 2002 that was partially renovated to house a museum full of the grim remnants. The space that held the turbines has become a performance hall, home to Krystjan Järvi's Baltic Sea Philharmonic which, determined to make national and artistic borders irrelevant, includes players (even if living in exile) from all the Baltic countries and mixes the classical and rock genres with extraordinary virtuosity.

© Adobe Stock

Over 230 delegates made it to Usedom, with festival representatives from as far afield as Shanghai, South Africa and Armenia. Several musicians and festival personnel drove from the beleaguered city of Kharkiv and other Ukrainians attended from Kyiv and from their bases in exile, like Alexey Botvinov, whom I interviewed for CM about his itinerant Odessa Classics festival in March. Gogolfest, an extraordinary site-specific music-theatre festival organisation, is also largely performing in exile, working with Western European festivals to keep the sense of urgency alive. Before the 2022 Russian invasion (but after Crimea and border provinces had been seized) Gogolfest had staged an astonishing spectacle involving performers on a tilting dry dock in Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, including contemporary music and a 'ballet' of the dockyard cranes. Mariupol has since borne the brunt of Russian bombing.

The sense that we are returning to seriously dangerous times, as we experienced at the start of the 1980s, was reinforced by the keynote speaker in that museum assembly hall, the former Polish President and leader of the Solidarity movement Solidarnosc, Lech Walesa, now aged 80 but with a clear (if not altogether shared) idea of the reforms the international system needs.

At the summit the UK was represented by the British Arts Festivals Association, the Edinburgh and Manchester International Festivals and the BBC Proms. There were also city officials from the European Festivals Association's (EFA) Seal programme, under which cities sign a pledge to commit support to festivals in their jurisdiction. The initiative began two years ago, and signatories already include Edinburgh, Bergen, Ghent, Krakow, Girona, Tartu, Yerevan, Varna and Ljubljana. This year two from Georgia signed up, their officials looking slightly bemused as they came to grips with EFA's culture of hugging!

Aside from all the networking – always the core of any gathering of this kind – the first day was devoted to a series of pre-assigned break-out groups, each dealing with a particular set of challenges facing festivals, from funding to sustainable staging, the relationship between festivals and society, and the vision for the next few years. The attendees were asked to consider two complicated questions; how do they contribute to better conditions for people and the planet, and what do festivals need to achieve those aims? Much of this was influenced by a strong sense that the assumptions of the arts festival world for the last half century are now open to question. There are threats, not just from the impact of Russia's war, but also from the shift to the right in many national governments, which tend to favour policies that cut funding to arts organisations or require them to restrict content.

Together with the pressures of post-Covid inflation, the diminution in audiences' spending power, and the increasing heat of summer months, the normal optimism of festival directors is under considerable strain though the sector is still expanding and shows few signs of imminent contraction. Inevitably some countries, especially those with generous public purse support are doing better than others. However, some of the traditionally most active festival countries – France, the UK and the Netherlands among them – are facing worrying times. Others, for example Italy and Turkey, are proving resilient.

On the final evening the participants boarded a ferry and crossed the very choppy sea to the town of Miedzyzdroje on Wolin in Poland. There, the writer and co-curator of the Culturescapes Festival in Basel, Kateryna Botanova, gave a sobering assessment of the effect of war in Ukraine, her home country. It was followed by a deeply moving performance of Penderecki's Third String Quartet, Leaves from an Unwritten Diary, that illustrated both the urgency of the times and how Europe's festivals are joining forces to provide a musical voice. The three Ukrainian musicians and Belgian cellist were brought together as the Katerina Suprun Quartet by the Kharkiv, Usedom and Walden (Belgium) festivals, under EFA's emerging artists fund (EFFEA). The fund, with calls twice per year, is open for participation by UK festivals too, despite Brexit (see effea.eu).

The 2025 European Festivals Summit will be held in Edinburgh (exact dates still to be decided but likely to be in May). There are over 140 festivals and organisations involved in EFA and it is hoped that British funding agencies will enable more festivals from the UK to take an active role, both in EFA itself and in the national hub network, the British Arts Festivals Association. There is real concern that British festivals, faced with so many worries about funding, are too often absent from important discussions and activities.