IF Festival Newspaper 2023

Festival News caught up with Sarah-Louise Young ahead of her award-winning show An Evening Without Kate Bush in The Spiegeltent on July 23, 8pm. Over a career spanning five decades, the singer Kate Bush has always attracted loyal and devoted followers. An Evening Without Kate Bush explores their stories though her music, celebrating one of the most influential voices in British pop culture.

An icon, an enigma and a ‘chaotic cabaret cult’

What attracted you to Kate Bush as the possible subject for the show? Were you a fan of her music before you created it?

I’ve always loved Kate Bush’s music and as a child of the 1970s and 1980s remember that first appearance on Top Of The Pops and all those amazing videos and songs which followed. Kate Bush is a true icon: her music is unique, spanning nearly five decades, winning countless awards and selling millions of records but the woman herself is something of an enigma.

Not performing live for over 30 years between her 1979 Tour Of Life and 2014 Before The Dawn, she spoke to us through her music. In her physical absence, her fans created their own community: ‘The Fish People’. They are at the heart of An Evening Without Kate Bush. We wanted to celebrate them through her music. That was the starting point of making the show.

Do you try and impersonate her in the show?

I never set out to impersonate her - I mean, who could? But it’s amazing how many people tell me I sound like her though. A few fans thought I was miming at the start of the show… How hard is it to sing in her unique vocal range?

It’s definitely a vocally athletic workout. She sang them all live back in 1979 apart from Hammer Horror so there’s no excuse not to do the same. What you hear on the albums is months of intricate layering of harmonies and different instruments, so it’s a more raw sound on stage of course.

Do you have to know her music and be a super-fan to enjoy An Evening Without Kate Bush?

Absolutely not. It’s one of the biggest compliments the show has received. Of course, if you are a super-fan you’ll hear lots of the songs you know and love plus some little hidden gems for those in the know. But none of that is at the expense of the audience members who have perhaps come along with a fan friend or just out of curiosity.

Does the show change each night depending on the audience’s reactions?

No two shows are the same and I love that. It keeps it fresh and alive.

I ask the audience what their favourite songs are or what’s brought them to the show and then weave their stories into the evening’s entertainment. We call it a ‘chaotic cabaret cult’ and it really is. It’s playful, anarchic, touching, hot and sweaty and full of music and laughter.

Imagine if Kate Bush made a tribute show about her fans and you come close to capturing the spirit of An Evening Without Kate Bush. Even if you just howl with the hounds or wave a hand in the air, you are still part of the experience.

I love hearing people’s stories

Sunday 23 July, 8pm Tickets: £20

Book tickets at ifmiltonkeynes.org or at The Stables Box Office on 01908 280800.

and I always come into the foyer afterwards to chat to anyone who wants to stay and talk. The audience really make this show. Do you have a favourite moment in the show?

I guess my favourite parts are when something spontaneous or unexpected happens as a result of some audience interaction. They keep me on my toes and anything unique to that gathering of people reminds them and me that this night, this configuration of people will never happen again. It’s special.

I like theatre which is made with love and danger. That excites me.

Why do you think Kate Bush remains so adored and intriguing to so many people after all the decades?

Her fans have travelled with her and as she has evolved as an artist, she has become the soundtrack to their lives. That’s my ovenready hypothesis. I also think she influenced so many other artists that the whole music scene is steeped in her musical juices as it were.

She was one of the first people to experiment with the Fairlight, she mastered complex sampling of vocals including the Trio Bulgarka from Hungary and if you read the list of pop royalty lining up to play a couple of bars on her albums, everyone wants to work with her.

She never shied away from writing about the largeness of life either; epic themes, the loneliness of love, the wonder of creation, the sensuality of being human. Her albums are somewhere you can climb inside and dream in. She’s one of us and yet totally ‘other’.

Photo: Steve Ullathorne

Brace yourself... get set for the unexpected

A HOMELESS man sits next to his possessions, watching intently as art installations take shape around the place he calls his own, outside a former supermarket in Central Milton Keynes. Preparations are under way for the first IF: Milton Keynes International Festival. It is 2010 and some leading public figures in Milton Keynes alongside UK arts and culture leaders are on site to watch as the vision for the Festival slowly, inexorably becomes reality.

“I fondly remember the first Festival,” says its founding director Monica Ferguson, Chief Executive and Artistic Director of The Stables which founded and produces the Festival today. “We were delivering a lot of street performances and art installations across the city centre and a homeless man said how fantastic it all was.

“He had no roof over his head, yet he was still able to see and experience amazing things. He also offered to distribute Festival brochures to passers-by and for me that was a moment that spoke volumes about the value of putting high-quality experiential artistic projects in a public space.”

Monica and the team have been putting the finishing touches to preparations for IF: Milton Keynes International Festival 2023, the seventh to be staged in the city and a festival that has drawn more than a million visitors over its six previous incarnations.

As before, this year’s Festival takes place across Milton Keynes, in parks, public squares, commercial and retail spaces. The beating heart of the Festival, the Spiegeltent is back in Campbell Park hosting comedy, contemporary circus, cabaret, kids shows and live music. An outdoor family opera takes place in Great Linford Manor Park based

on Laura Carlin’s book The Promise. Pop-up events take place in the Fred Roche Gardens, Midsummer Place and Xscape.

“This Festival is huge” says Monica, speaking fresh from a briefing to many of the 200 volunteers who will guide visitors to the installations and performances.

IF has expanded this year to accommodate some of the international artists booked for the 2020 Festival that was cancelled due to the pandemic - a lower-key Festival with mainly UK artists took place in 2021, drawing around 65,000 visitors. Raising the bar in every sense this year is the French company Gratte Ciel, performing the aweinspiring Place des Anges Feature: pages 4-5.

Preparations are extensive. Place des Anges [The Place of Angels] lasts only 40 minutes but its staging takes a week to set up and involves 28 people from the company crossing the English Channel to north Buckinghamshire. Its size and complexity is why the work has been performed only twice before in the UK; in 2012 at London’s Cultural Olympiad and at Hull’s UK Capital of Culture programme in 2016.

“Milton Keynes is a big city with big boulevards and big open spaces,” says Monica. “It needs something largescale to make a real statement about Milton Keynes being a destination festival. So many people in the industry who I look up to are in agreement that this is one of the best outdoor events you could possibly see. It’s a huge privilege to bring it to Milton Keynes and I know it will bring so much joy.”

Place des Anges will bring IF to a memorable close over two nights on July 28 and 29. But it is just one production of a fascinating and exciting

programme.

Take Alter, a thoughtprovoking show in an secret woodland location by award-winning collective Kamchàtka that explores themes of migration and displacement of people. “I experienced it in France where we were transported 30 minutes or so through the mountains in the dark to the performance,” Monica recalls. “The company took us on a really emotional journey through the eyes of someone who may have been taken away from somewhere not knowing where or how their journey would end. There’s an amazing twist at the end - you come away with a memory to treasure.”

IF delivers frivolity, “quirky free family stuff that is just great fun”. But the programme also has a serious side. “Some of the projects invite people to question how they think about certain subjects, individual attitudes or social themes.

“When we were invited to see Alter, the horror unfolding in Ukraine was uppermost in my mind. I was worried it might be seen as insensitive so it was essential to go and

see it. I came away thinking that it’s absolutely right that we present this now. It makes you question what you can do to help.”

A large proportion of IF is free or low cost to attend thanks to seed funding from Arts Council England and Milton Keynes Council matched by a fundraising campaign supported by

individual donors, trusts and foundations, co-commissions and collaborations with business. centre:mk, has been involved with the Festival since 2010 and its headline partner since 2016. This year

Middleton Hall will stage the immersive The Place Between by Rebecca Louise Law with soundscapes by Jason Singh, an installation of preserved

flowers and plant material through which visitors pass surrounded by the sounds of plants and trees captured using bio feedback technology.

Law invited locals to participate by donating flowers and helping to wire over 200,000 individual elements that make up the epic hanging garden.

“Involving local people and communities in my work is really important to me,” she says. “It makes an artwork particular to a place which I find very special.”

After the festival comes a period of debrief and analysis, paying suppliers and returning equipment, before work begins on the next edition. “It’s important to spend time reflecting during this period,” says Monica. “It builds a good foundation for work to start on the next Festival.”

Our conversation nears its end. Why should I come to IF? I ask. “Why not come? Most of it is free and you will see things that you don’t expect. There is plenty that will make you smile and lots of memories to make.”

Festival director Monica Ferguson talks to Andrew Gibbs about IF’s evolution and looks forward to the largest and most spectacular festival yet.

Monica Ferguson

Festival News

Magic memories and emotional connections

ITS INVESTMENT in IF: Milton

Keynes International Festival is reaping richer rewards for headline sponsor centre:mk as each event goes by.

The shopping centre has supported the festival since its debut in 2010, seeing it as an opportunity to bring more reason for visitors to come to Milton Keynes in the first place and, more importantly, to return.

IF plays an important role in promoting Milton Keynes both in a different light and on the world stage. centre:mk uses the vast space of Middleton Hall to host spectacular art installations that invariably become a highlight of each festival; from the bright lights of the Magic Carpets installation in 2016 and the vibrant, buzzing Circus Hub two years later to the mesmerising and thought-provoking Gaia, a sculpture of Planet Earth suspended above Middleton Hall and which proved such a talking point at the festival in 2021.

For centre:mk’s centre director Kevin Duffy, giving back to the city by delivering social value is so important to creating a connection between the customers, the retailers and the centre itself. That, he says, is what brings visitors back.

“Milton Keynes is an unusual place,” he says. “It does not have a typical high street - centre:mk is the high street and the town square so it is about us creating a connection and using the city centre to create events in the square that really

promote the city’s cultural heritage and the diversity of Milton Keynes.

We are part of the city and we want to echo that in what we do by providing world-class events in an unusual, different location.”

Kevin’s first experience of IF was in 2016 and the Magic Carpets installation created by digital artist Miguel Chevalier. Constantly changing brightly coloured shapes transformed the floor of Middleton Hall into a captivating display.

“It was amazing and it made me realise the potential we had with the space.”

Middleton Hall’s versatility allowed the centre subsequently to host the Circus Hub and Gaia installations. This year, Middleton Hall houses The Place Between, created by artist Rebecca Louise Law who is known for creating immersive installations with natural materials.

Preserved flowers individually sewn and suspended are a staple of her work, with visitors invited to navigate through them.

Commissioned with centre:mk, The Place Between is emerging with the help of Milton Keynes residents collecting and donating local plant life to supplement her collection and helping to wire each element to create an entrancing hanging garden. The installation has inspired a specially created soundscape by sound artist Jason Singh that will run alongside.

“The work aims to create a moment of contemplation and quiet when we can look at the world in a different way,” says Kevin. “We want to generate a wider emotional connection with our customers and one of the ways we do that is by the environment that we create.

Art installations create a magic memory, a moment in time when the customer makes that emotional investment in the shopping centre.”

centre:mk has increased its sponsorship investment in each festival. Its figures show that the

The largest and most spectacular show that IF: Milton Keynes International Festival has ever presented, Place des Anges is sure to be a highlight of this year’s Festival programme. We caught up with Camille Beaumier, the company’s producer and director, and asked her about the story behind this amazing production.

The performances will be only the third time that Place des Anges has been seen in the UK. The previous two took place at London’s Cultural Olympiad in 2012 and at Hull’s UK Capital of Culture programme in 2016.

Tell us a little about Gratte Ciel and the type of work that the company produces. You tour the world with your productions.

CB Gratte Ciel is a company specialising in large-scale outdoor performance and particularly aerial performance. We come from the mountains in the south of France and have a history as climbers, cavers and alpinists. We started using our outdoor techniques to create performances on mountain cliffs first, then in urban settings, combining them with circus. We now try to find a balance between internationally touring productions and smaller scale local and community projects.

And now you’re bringing Place des Anges to Milton Keynes for this year’s Festival. What was the creative impulse for this production?

Place Des Anges started as a joke and its success took us by surprise. The show was created 15 years ago and still reflects our relationship with the vast open space, the air, the verticality. How we find freedom, pleasure and weightlessness in playing with huge heights and how we land on the ground to share this sheer joy with audiences wherever we perform. What can Festival audiences expect to see, hear and experience at Place des Anges? It’s a show for all the

family to come and see?

It is certainly a moment to share among friends, family, old and young. It is an immersive experience where an aerial ballet

installations inspire more visits - in 2021, footfall rose by 12.5 per cent in the period that IF had installations in Middleton Hall and around centre:mk compared to the week before. Given that Middleton Hall hosts around 200 events a year, giving visitors more reason to come

is important to the centre’s growth.

“Our sponsorship of IF is an investment in the centre and community to make sure that centre:mk stays really relevant to today’s shopper,” says Kevin.

Every IF: Milton Keynes International Festival helps to

strengthen the reputation of Milton Keynes as a city of substance.

“It has not been seen as a place of culture and history but we are building that now and it is changing people’s perception,” says Kevin.

“It is a great place to do business and we need to be encouraging business visitors to come here. We need to play our part in driving economic development.

“The amount of positive PR that IF generates for the city is incredible. We should be celebrating our city status as much as possible and IF has put us on the world stage. These world-class performances and events helps wider business in Milton Keynes.”

Gaia by Luke Jerram 2021

Kevin Duffy

Rebecca Louise Law

Photo: Fabio Affuso

The Circus Hub and Curiosities fair with games. 2018

Magic Carpets by Miguel Chevalier with Sound Spheres by Ray Lee. 2016

‘IF has put us on the world stage’

Photo: Tom Arron

The stuff that dreams are made of

is performed above the heads then lands in the middle of the crowd for the biggest party of the year. But it is also about being a child again, losing the plot… the stuff

dreams are made of.

It’s a massive outdoor show. From a production and technical perspective, what are the particular challenges

and excitements of bringing it to a city centre location like Milton Keynes?

These types of performances happen once or twice a year. They

VOLUNTEER PARTNER

are events in themselves and take months or years to prepare. They are a rendezvous between ourselves and between us and the audience.

The technical and logistical sides are quite challenging but after 15 years of performing the show around the world, we now have some good systems in place and a very solid team.

We are excited to bring the show back to the UK. We have had special encounters with British audiences in the past and Brexit brought with it the fear that we would not return to the UK for a while. But it feels that the appetite for large-scale shows and

international productions in the UK is larger than ever.

We are delighted - and particularly delighted to come to Milton Keynes, a project that has been in the making since 2019.

What has the audience reaction been to Place des Anges in other venues around the world where you’ve performed it?

“Mortgage the house. Sell your possessions. Do anything that makes it possible to see Place Des Anges”. This quote from the Australian Advertiser in March 2018 pretty much sums it upeven if we may say so ourselves.

See Place des Anges at Secklow Gate car park near The Point. Performances take place on July 28 and 29, 9.45pm. Tickets are £6 and must be booked in advance. Book at ifmiltonkeynes.org or call The Stables box office on 01908

BID backs the bid to attract national audience

BRINGING a broader and more mainstream audience to Milton Keynes is the aim of a significant investment in an advertising campaign by IF: Milton Keynes International Festival.

Previous festivals have relied on social media and other networking to promote themselves and draw their audience. Now, with support from MyMiltonKeynes Business Improvement District, IF organisers are taking their marketing national with a marketing campaign on the Sky network.

The BID, which represents levypaying employers within the city centre, has supported IF: Milton Keynes International festival from the beginning. Historically it has funded the volunteers who guide visitors around the events, exhibitions, performances and installations, providing their uniforms and transport around the city centre aboard the MyBus shuttle.

This year chief executive Melanie Beck wanted more.

“We did not just want to fund the volunteering so this year we have underwritten the cost of advertising

the festival,” she says. “That has never been done before and I am hoping it is going to draw a wider group of people than we normally get.

“IF has grown organically in terms of its audience but giving this extra funding assistance will increase awareness of IF and we are looking to grow a bigger and more mainstream audience. The line-up this year is probably one of the best.”

The BID is of the view that IF is a major player in the development of the Milton Keynes economy and that of the wider region. “It is a huge opportunity for us to spread awareness of Milton Keynes as way more than a concrete jungle and showcasing it as a host of big events

that attract acts from all over the world,” says Melanie.

“IF has a critical role in showcasing both the entertainment and the B2B offer in Milton Keynes and therefore there is an economic impact from that.”

The city community takes that on board at every IF, with scores offering their services as volunteers. This year more than 200 have rallied to the cause. “Everyone

should get involved,” says Melanie. “IF is huge for our city. It has gone from one woman’s dream to a flourishing event with so many performers from across the world. People underestimate just what it brings.”

IF generates national coverage and certain to feature is Pasture with Cows, an installation of pastoral bliss in Fred Roche Gardens next to the Church of Christ the Cornerstone. Take a visit to see real cows - not the concrete beasts for which Milton Keynes is known - grazing in the gardens within an outsized picture frame.

Inspired by Old Master paintings of livestock, Pasture with Cows is the work of Belgian company Captain Boomer and is being staged with the BID’s considerable help.

Melanie is looking forward most to Place des Anges, which promises a truly spectacular finale to this year’s festival. “I feel that this is going to be a real ‘Wow’ event,” she says. “It sums up what IF brings. It always brings something exceptional that you never expected to see but remember for a long time.”

‘IF is huge for our city... People underestimate just what it brings’

Pasture with Cows, performed by the Captain Boomer company, takes place in Fred Roche Gardens

Melanie Beck

IF: Milton Keynes International Festival