Festivals promise to deliver the exotic and the alien;precisely that makes them so unloved by artists. They are held to make the strange appetising, serving up the unknown like a Chinese restaurant will provide you witha knife and fork. This up for the rich and strange peters out when, in understandable incomprehension, one's own western criteria only give birth to new prejudices.

Festivals once used to pop up for a couple of weeks in the summer in usual places with mostly obscure theatre groups; their sudden arrival and just as sudden disappearance held a promise of suprises, overwelming sensations and dedication, festivals promised a festivity. Today the festival experience is compressed programme of events that enervates rather than intoxicates.

The "old festivals" served up the intgredients for an encounter with the audience - a brew of high art, street and everyday culture, experts and dabblers, non- European and local, kitsch and catharsis… a new sort of people's fair. You discovered the theatre as more than a decorative cultural ornament. Not a "thetare for the audience" as recently demanded by German critic Marcel Reich - Ranicki - no no, these weren't celebratations of mutual agreement but of the irreconcilable.

It's rather like the slight difference between a smile and a grin. One calls it "the grinning skulls in the auditorium:" a barely-perceptible raising of the corners of the mouth as if they're stitched to the ears. You come across whole auditoriums full of people siezed by this rictus. The phenomenon appears above all when actors and audience arrive at a perfect, unquestioning complicity.

The end of seventies - saw Kazuo Ohno for first time, in a tent in Munich with 3000 others. The shock! This dance was so ugly, so incomprehensible. Walked out twice and back in again, much to the irration of the ushers. And then the aftershock when one recognised, in this Japanese/alien/ungraspable strangeness, elements of our own German Ausdruckstanz, in the freeze-frame scenes from the atom bomb's flash, distorted, frozen forever… someone was dancing there who'd survived the apocalypse.

The first time I saw Meredith Monk: New York, mid-70's at a little festival of experimental music. Frail little thing in a white girl's dress; hammering out the hard, monotonous chords on the piano and making some sort of organ-pipe-noise I didn t know the term "overtone singing" back then. I was flabbergasted: yes, was she allowed to do that? I got a strong feeling thet it couldn't be permitted.

Tadeusz Kantor in the mid-seventies in Florence where he began his professional exile.An ambassador sent to us from the kingdom of childhood, a herald with important tidings from the past. Went to the show six times in all, each time with growing wonder.

What was once shock, bafflement and wonder can turn into consumption; today our festivals organise an international exchange of arts goodies. In Berlin I often go shopping at "Reichheit". "Reichheit" in Charlottenburg it's a suppermarket a cut above the rest. On the edge of the vegetable department that tries to present its wares like in an Italien mercato, there recently appeared a wooden crate with loose German organically- grown potatoes next to the plastic bags of Euro - toxic spuds or South American curare tubers. Help and advice with your purchase is on hand: the sales staff see themselves as prosesletisers of the produce and tutors to the customers. The branch of the same "Reicheit" chain in Moabit has a few shelves of vegetables - one cant't speak of a department - and an astonishing selection of brandy, schapps and Bommerlunder. The "Reicheit" style in Moabit is that of vast tippling den. The satff patrol between the shelves telling the customers off.

The succes of supermarket somewhere between organic potatoes and booze, customer advice and customer monitoring depends on its location. Festivals are a higher form of providers of our basic needs and little luxuries; whether they're aware of their local customer's needs is for me the decisive factor.

Quality Consistency Control?

Criticism of festivals by arts wathers has been mounting for something like the last seven years and it always follows the same two lines of argument; The first reproach concerns the uniformity of the goods on offer it's not that festivals present themselves as marketplaces of consumer events which is objected to but that the festivals around the world have joined up in arts supermarket chain with identical wares which are just rotated.

The second reproach concerns the quality of the goods on offer: that the produce doesn't taste of anyting individual, regional or national anymore, that it hasn't retained its colour, temperament and exotic taste when transplanted to European soil, that it no longer matches exactly our expectations and wishes about its country of origin. At the greengrocer's they call it label-swopping: the much-trumpeted "paradise apple" Israeli dwfar tomato tastes just like the watery Dutch tomato. In the theatre arts festival critics are also getting wise to the swindle - on stage everything, according to them looks the same:sort of European or global, the movements and the form vocabularies much of muchness and the word and his wife speaks the speech. I pray you, in a clipped, castrated English.

Both illneses are diagnosed as festivalitis or interfestivalism. Critics call for stricter quality controls on the produce of "International Theatre" at all cost it must become more original and also more authentic, more foreign.

To take the first accusation, that all festivals are the same: Yes, you often see the same names and productions popping up the festival circuit. Things will stay that way, I hope. Without this network of festival colleagues certain productions would never see the light of day. Some groups - Wooster Group from New York, Tomaz Pandur from Maribor, Silviu Purcarete from Rumania to name just three famous ones - would hardly have been able to produce at all without inter-festival collbotarions. Some international festivals are sustainig a little worldwide repertoire. Nothing wrong with that - that the same performances are seen in Vienna, Paris, Amsterdam and Hamburg in the course of a season is no problem for the funding politicos, the local audience or the visiting artist: the ones with the problem are the critics and the institutional arts watchers.

The second accusation, this call for authenticity, is much more interesting because it's a recurring, disputed and completely unresolved problem for the artists and creators themselves and for each and every international festival. In connection with such reproaches, one hears stuffy terms like "engendering culture", "original context', "original art" and so on. In an ideal world an original- authentic-foreign theatre production ought to stand "full square in the tradition of its country of origin" or at least have taken sufficient thought about these traditions to be able to justify why one has departed from them. This original-authentic-foreign production must be capable of "imparting information about its culture of origin" but should also preserve a critical distance from it; shouldn't by "folkloric or separatist, or especially want to avoid issues of national identity". Such a production may be financed from international funds but should if possible be devised and rehearsed "nowhere else but the homeland or within its culture origin and be suited to "an authentic local audience".

This Western emotionalism about "engendering culture" and the yearning for a collusion of tradition, location and language are reactions to a fake multicultural enthusiasm that was sparked off in the eighties by Peter Brook's "Mahabharata": the first intercultural performance to be acclaimed right across Europe. For theatre people and intellectuals in Delhi who took any notice of Brook's production, the piece was a brutal insult and wounding of their culture. They christened it the "Readers Digest Mahabharata". Because nobody in Europe knew much about the "Mahabharata" and nothing about theatrical approaches to this gern of world literature in India, we asked hardly any awkward questions. First one has to take on board that terms such as colonialism and racism don't just get bandied about some way off in the worlds of politics and sociology but can be pointedly applied to the theatre and our arts praxis.

Behind this wish for authenticity, howewer, lies something else apart from a bad colonialist conscience. The productions by young Chinese director Mou Sen, for example, can't be seen in China, he's no opportunity to stage them there.His three productions so far were financed exlcusively from European sources and half of the rehearsal period was spent in Brussels, Paris, Lyon or Dresden. Mou Sen is reluctant to go on record as blaming the impossibility of performing in China on censorship or a performance blacklist; the fact is that independent productions in China may not charge admission. Mou Sen and his friends- authors, filmmakers, theatre people and artists - can't however afford to hire venues, pay performers a wage and play without a box office income. In this sense a financial problem is, perhaps, effectively censorship. Mou Sen, however insists on naming the state of affairs which is the cause of so much public mistrust: so is he not an artist in exile but just another economic refugee? On top of that, the status of this theatre is regarded with misgiving- whether by residing in Eyrope, it romans /remain "Chinese" enought Mou Sen has no interest whatsoever in classical Chinese theatre arts, disliking the traditional voice training of Chinese actors who learn to declaim at an working with "everyday voices" and amateurs. The bitch is that this "rough" performance of texts which are spoken as if in passing is very reminiscent of modern Western performance techniques. In interviews Mou Sen has to constantly renerate that he has never seen a performance by the New York Wooster Group or Belgium's Needcompany, no not even on video. It's apparently hard to credit that a Chinese director had taken thought about private public, learned and diletante speech on stage and conclusions to those reached by - 1970's New York avantgarde group. One camp picks holes in the "un-Chinese formal vocabulary" the other claims that it's a poor adaption of an avantgarde movement ten years out or date. These mutterings are familiar to anyone who presents contemporary artists from outside the European cultural context. The old cry : modernism belongs to us, here in the West! The modi operandi of modernism, this dismantling and reorganisation of combined forms - all this our business and ours alone! We thought of it first and we are the only ones who have to stand up and take the consequences! Artists from outside Europe should stick to what they do best, i.e. a strong identity of content and form.

But these intercultural misunderstandings have a long tradition: the festival which has so far dared the most in substituting communication for consumption and was pilloried for it was the Los Angeles festival staged by Peter Sellars in 1990. In L.A. 66% of the population speak Spanish but he official language is English spoken on alittle white reservation in the centre of town called Beverly Hills - whichisn't city centre at all but a separate town that has nothing to do with the urban conurbation surrounding it L.A. is home to the biggest Korean population outside Korea the biggest Japanese population outside Japan, the second Jewish community outside Israel, the largest group of Native Americans and so on. California is set to become the first state of the union in witch whites are in the minority. The very successful L.A. Festival was a Beverly Hills festival untilSellers took over.

Sellers brought the culture of the Pacine Ring back to L. A. the culture of the original inhabitants - Aborigines , Koreans, Haitians. The festival was all over the city and entrance was free (that's to say one could if one really needed a plush seat and a reservation, catch the performances at a theatre but could just as easily take them in the next day somewhere outside for nothing). One remarcable phenomen was that of the 1500 artists taking part something like 900 where residents of L.A.: suddenly you glimbsed the lawyer from accros the road dancing in a headdress and fetters, and it dawned on you who your neighbour's really were. Sellers called L.A. an experiment from a laboratory that ought investigate whether something - like a global culture was actually possibly: "the test tube for the next century."

Public opinion was incened cynical and rabidly opposed.. a typical comentary the respected German news weekly " Spiegel": "In the city's parks Cambodian folklore troupes and hula - hula acrobats from Hawaii danced in the sweltering afternoon heat. An often baffled public gaped at the wild dance rites of Australian Aborigines and Polinesien Islanders.

The sweltering heat would have been more of a dicomfort for the perspiring journalist that the Cambodians, accustomed a they are to temperatures arround 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The unacclimaseed, damp and hot hack cooled off with a couple of stereotypes typical of reports on non - European culture.

The dance rites of the Aborigines are not "wild" but choreographed. The "hula- hula acrobats" are members of the Pulani family: at the University of Hawaii they teach this complex dance which translates the poetry of their ancestors but also the everyday language of today into formalised movement. It is kind of concrete danced poetry an art form of memory and the handing down of their people's history. They are impressively serious, wonderful artists. The "Spiegel" commentary just revived out pallid memories of the imported hula hoop craze of the 50 's it puffed the tourism aspect where there was really something to be discovered Peter Sellar's festival never took place in this form again after the first one he lost two thirds of his funding and sponsorship.

Festivals accumulate contradictions and grubby accretions. Better then in any theatre, one can read the signs of what's currently possible with art the flight from art and its destruction. The quandaries of global and local artistic developments are immanent for any festival with international aspirations, such festivals legitimise themselves precisely through the cultural diversity; artist is invited as herald and representative of his/her country to live out and rehearse peaceful coexistence in this brief communality.But it 's also a marketing dilemma because authenticated " cultural identity" is a rare commodity.

The trends in 20th- century arts are almost all directed towards a global aesthic language that crosses every cultural border. The interesting questions are thus: How can we present diverse cultures in their political surroundings? How can we improve production facilities in other countries? Here it's precisely the supermarket chain connections which gives us the neccesary room for manoeuver. Festivals are always marketed as unique one-off events and so culture becomes a kind of consumer sport, but the specific question of local identity is addressed by international festivals especially in the context of the day-to-day life of their host cities and they know the audiences they're working to attract. How do you secure a popular audience for demanding ideas? What would contemporary people's festival look like? How do we find the punters? How do we make them an interactive part of the festival? An appeal to all those sad branch managers of the international festival culture supermarkets who in the last seven years have been hauled over the coals: we really must broaden our range even more! We don't have to keep looking for the unique, authentic product. Our biggest buyer, the arts business is suffering from bulemia, compulsively swallowing every novel idea only to vomit it. Let us rather go looking for new punters, taking a leaf out of the shopping list the shoplifter.