Interview with Cairns Festival Producer

INTERVIEWING THE PRODUCER Q & A with Eric Holowacz July 2011

What sets Cairns Festival apart from other arts events?

Answering that question is the driving force behind my role as a producer. It's what our festival team keeps asking itself: what do we as a unique community want Cairns Festival to become over the next few years? How can it shine as something unique in the world?

There are dozens of annual festivals all over Australia, and many of them stick to the same event-based formula. There's nothing wrong with tried and true audience programming, but I think we can do more as a festival and as a creative place. Life in the Far North is very special, unique, distinctly tropical. We are different to Sydney or Auckland. And maybe, we can do some things better.

So how do we go beyond that stock model?

Over the past few years, Cairns Festival has introduced a few innovative ways to support our local creative people. Our team has been working to develop extraordinary collaborations and creative connections for North Queensland, near and far. Projects like Opening Notes, Posters to the People, visiting artist residencies, and the Far North Mobile Ukulele Unit are just the beginning. We've invite artists to explore our unique cultural identity and sense of place—this tropical ethos. Together, we’re starting to make creative things happen throughout the year, not just at Festival time.

How did you come to call Cairn’s home?

I have moved around the world over the past decade, working in arts leadership roles and supporting creative people. I have had cultural management tenures in some pretty special places: the Lowcountry of South Carolina, across the ditch in Wellington, and then most recently the remote island of Key West, Florida. As an American who became a Kiwi in 2007, I had often heard of Cairns and the Far North, and many Wellington friends came back raving about their tropical experience here. So when my role as founding chief executive of a new artists colony in Key West was up, there was a definite allure back to the Southern Hemisphere: a pull towards Cairns. In early 2010, I was lucky enough to get the job as producer of Cairns Festival, and have been working for the local regional identity and creative people ever since.

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How did you get into your profession?

Just over 20 years ago, I was finishing a degree in art history and English literature in South Carolina, not really knowing what I would do after graduation. I managed to score an exchange semester at the University of the Virgin Islands, in the West Indies, where I got my first taste of the real tropics. But Hurricane Hugo came through and pretty much wiped out the campus and my time there. When I got back to South Carolina for my final semester, I answered a helpwanted ad for a student intern at the state arts agency. They took me in, and I ended up spending a few more years there developing projects, learning about touring programs, supporting grants administration, planning exhibitions and art collections, and realizing that I had become a cultural engineer. So it was by post-cyclone happenstance that my career in the arts began, and I have been grateful for the storm (and the calm that followed) ever since.

Tell us more about your background, and experiences as an arts worker.

I grew up in South Carolina and started my career there, just over twenty years ago. Early on, I served as publicist for Spoleto Festival, and later became its operations manager in the mid1990s. Founder Gian Carlo Menotti was still at the helm, and he had some great lessons about how multi-disciplinary festivals could be. And his festivals were proving grounds for new works and collaborations. They nurtured people like Yo Yo Ma, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, and Mary Jane Jacob. There I was exposed to amazing artists like Compagnie Philippe Genty, Joe Goode Performance Group, jazz greats Pharoah Sanders and Jimmy Giuffre, and visual artists like Ann Hamilton, David Hammonds, and Christian Boltanski. And I got to work with Charles Wadsworth, founder of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and inspiring arts administrators Eric Gastelli, Roman Terleckyj, and others. Those four years were like a second University education in the arts.

Do you have any fond memories from that time?

My first year at Spoleto Festival was 1992. I was working in the press room. I remember assisting a television interview and standing on stage with Maestro Menotti and a very old Filippo Sanjust, who was directing the main opera that year, Donizetti's Il duca d'Alba. In back of us was the original set from the 1882 production, rescued from a warehouse and restored by Luchino Visconti for his 1959 Spoleto production in Italy. On the same stage, opening the season, was the Ballets de Monte Carlo, about to premiere an amazingly frenetic and MTVinspired dance work by Karole Armitage. I drove violinist Joshua Bell around to his radio interviews, talked to famous sculptors about their work, and saw what a great festival could do for a town. It didn't hit me at the time, but I what I had was an incredible backstage pass to the 20th century's artistic heritage, and the frequent genius of Menotti's festival programming.

And then what did you do?

The next year I became publications coordinator and press room manager, and then ended up serving as Operations Manager for Spoleto Festival for a few more years. After that I spent a year managing an alternative rock band, friends from high school who were the first band to be signed to the American arm of UK-based Mute Records. We toured a bit of the world, and then I found a real job again in 1996 or 97 and settled down for the next six years as chief executive of a small arts council and performing arts centre on the South Carolina coast. I had a small gallery to program exhibitions, a 474-seat proscenium theatre, an annual artists' retreat on a remote barrier island, and lots of good creative people to inspire me.

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But then you became a Kiwi?

In 2002, my wife, daughter and I moved to Wellington, New Zealand, where she found a job as a Neonatal ICU nurse, and I landed the role of arts manager for the Capital City. Creative industries and cultural policies were a focus of the Mayor, and I ended up helping initiate a public art programme, a new multi-facility arts centre, and was given the opportunity to develop projects and work as what you might call a cultural engineer. It was a great time for us, escaping the Bush years and that War on Terror, and growing our family across the ditch. But then, three years ago I was recruited away to serve as founding executive director of The Studios of Key West, which began as a barely-formed entity with little programming and ended up a visionary creative complex at America's Southernmost City. I had lots of help, and a great staff, and I am very proud of what we were able to establish for that small island community. In early 2010, wanting to get back to the Southern Hemisphere, I answered the call for Cairns Festival Producer, and within a few months I was training my successor in Key West and moving my family back across the world again. It is truly wondrous here in the tropics, and every day in the Far North brings discoveries, new bird songs, unfamiliar insects, places to explore. This tropical life and local culture are pretty special.

How do you define culture?

A simple answer is that it is everything we know, and how we know it. Culture is the sum of what we do, and the reasons why we do it. You can study culture in minute detail, like an ethnographer or anthropologist. Or you can simply reflect on the patterns and aspects of daily life, and get better acquainted with a very personal notion of culture. Often that is what artists do. Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, said that culture is our answer to the challenges of life. Creative people, and the various outlets they use to channel artistic inspiration, often focus on those same challenges. They grapple with issues of time, place, and the human condition. The result is a very powerful bi-product of a culture: the arts.

Then how do you define art?

I don't try to, but Picasso summed it up pretty well when he said that "Art is a lie which makes us see the truth."

Tell us your favourite part of your job?

Being able to translate wild ideas into new projects and tangible reality is a wonderful aspect to a Festival Producer's job. In a way, it mimics what artists do as part of the creative process, and can be mysterious and Zen-like. Getting to work with hundreds of artists, and trying to find ways to support their ideas and dreams, is also a rare and special thing. Cairns Festival has a small core of hardworking people truly dedicated to our mission, and I feel grateful to be leading that team. And as a writer at heart, I absolutely love the story and the magic in the telling.

Almost every extraordinary work of art has an incredible story at its core, usually wrapped up in metaphor and meaning. Helping get those stories out there, so they connect with people, is another great part of my job. I also feel privileged to work with the notion of "sense of place" and community and cultural identity. Who are we? What does it mean to be that? How do we explain the here and now? What is unique in a particular place? These are questions that can often be answered by artists, poets, film-makers, playwrights, and the Zen of the creative process. And sometimes, I get to help.

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What are you looking forward to during the 2011 Cairns Festival?

I've worked with a half-dozen festivals over the years, and the greatest feeling always comes on the final day. That's when you know that all the efforts have paid off, the events have had an effect, sponsors are happy, the media took an interest, artists are still buzzing, and you finally begin to exhale. But from within our 2011 season, there is lots to look forward to. This is our 50th Festival, going back to the first creative gathering in 1962 and the dawn of Fun in the Sun, so we want to take a nostalgic look back over the decades. We've also been working on some interesting new partnerships, including a theatre exchange with Melbourne's La Mama Theatre, and a street performance element with Woodford Folk Festival.

In partnership with KickArts, and artist Ruby Boussard, the Festival is planning an ambitious and free creative kids area, Muddy's Art Village. There will be a half-dozen free outdoor music concerts on our Fogarty Park stage, put together by musician and impresario Roz Pappalardo.

And we’ve also got six free film nights, the mighty Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, and the Grand Parade and fireworks to bring the Far North together on Sunday 21 August.

What is the best festival you have ever attended?

Mardi Gras in New Orleans is pretty exciting. And the Boxing Day Junkanoo in the Bahamas is a crazy competitive revelry rooted deep in the West Indian and Afro-Caribbean tradition. I like discovering festivals when I travel, and even the smallest ones are an inspiration. My hometown of Irmo, South Carolina was known for its annual Okra Strut, a sort of suburban community celebration of that vegetable. And I grew up going to wonderful little small-town festivals in honor of peaches, watermelons, grits, boiled peanuts, and even chitlins. It was just part of life in South Carolina.

The most memorable for me, and a polar opposite to the Okra Strut, was my first year in the press room at Spoleto Festival in Charleston. As a young adult I found myself working with critics and arts writers from around the world, and in the same room as Festival founder Gian Carlo Menotti, legendary opera singers, chamber music pioneers, an Umbrian Countess, a poet laureate, and contemporary theatre companies. Spoleto Festival was and still is artistic statement of the highest order, a commingling of traditional and experimental. I developed my early career there, but my first season in 1992 will probably be my favorite Festival ever.

Do you have any cultural engineering ideas coming to fruition this year?

I really love to see ideas that support the creative process, connect with new audiences, and reveal cultural identity in interesting ways. One of the special projects we launched with last year's Cairns Festival is called Opening Notes. It's a simple idea that begins by gathering a diverse mix of locally-made music and producing a compilation CD. We'll package that with a booklet of images also meant to indicate our place and time. And we'll wrap it all up nicely and gift this package to every baby born in the region — on the day of birth, at the place of birth, from the community they are born into.

It’s a simple idea, giving the gift of cultural identity, but this particular model seems unique in all of Australia. New babies go home with nappies, a booklet about immunisations, and government forms. But now in Cairns, they also take home the gift of music, a beautiful booklet of images from the Far North, and maybe a deeper understanding of our sense of place.

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Cairns Festival has new Headquarters in City Place. You've giving away free local art, as part of a project called Posters to the People. What's that?

It's a simple community engagement idea that encourages people to connect with the work of Cairns-based visual artists—and make their images part of everyday life. We started by asking four diverse and talented people to each provide a work that reflects what they do as cultural producers and visual communicators. Caroline Mudge, Arone Meeks, Dominic Johns, and Sam Tupou answered the call last year. We printed 500 posters of each, and displayed them in stacks on the floor of the Festival Headquarters in City Place. The public was invited in to have a look, grab the posters they like, and go home with free local art. This year we’ve selected 8 Far North artists, and expect thousands of local families and residents to walk away with an instant Cairns Festival art collection.

Why focus on these non-event projects? Isn't a festival about tickets and audiences and crowds?

Well yes, that's the standard model for festivals from Perth to Peoria. But Cairns Festival wants to innovate, challenge the norm, and find new ways to connect residents and visitors with our culture—and not just during the Festival season. Part of the equation is about presenting amazing artists and extraordinary music, dance, and theatre. But there are other things we can try—like a rapid-deployment Mobile Ukulele Unit, complete with 100 instruments and an instructor, or a new street theatre environment created in partnership with Woodford Folk Festival, or a bold new connection and exchange with Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre.

What are some of the 2011 Festival event highlights?

Cultural celebration is what it's all about. Cairns Indigenous Art Fair is now in its second year, and runs over the Festival's opening weekend. That has already become an extraordinary gathering of creative elements, pure North Queensland art, and engaging conversations about what makes this a special part of the world.Avril Duck and Willem Brugman continue their development of local theatre work, When the Wheels Fall off the World, and the Regional Gallery, KickArts, and Canopy Artspace fill their walls with great works from the Far North.

Venues like the Tanks and Civic Theatre will host dozens of great performers over the 17 days—from The Panics and Tripod, to Jeff Lang and Renee Geyer. The Esplanade will again become the entertainment hub in the city, including the base for our new Muddy’s Art Village for kids and families and our incoming encampment of curious Gremlin characters.

The Festival has also amped up its other free programming, including six outdoor music events on our main stage at Fogarty Park, six free film nights that will be perfect for a family picnic, the (Un)seen Sculptures project of augmented reality installations, a late-night supper club we are calling Lush, and a 50th Festival Grand Parade on August 21.

In partnership with the Cairns Centre of Contemporary Arts, we’ve programmed a busy schedule of new dance, theatre, and stage works, including a world premiere with La Mama Theatre, a work by our playwright-in-residence Andrew Kramer, a investigative theatre piece exploring crime in the USA, a multi-media work by Fleur Elise Noble called The 2 Dimensional Life of Her, and a really an amazing puppet theatre piece by Asphyxia called The Grimstones: Mortimer Revealed. There will be magic on those stages.

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You also offer a Festival Artist Residency. How does that work?

I spent the past three years establishing a new artists colony and residency program on the island of Key West, Florida. My organisation hosted about 100 visiting artists during that time, as well as cultural managers and producers from all over the world. I saw firsthand how the artist residency model could provide inspiration, collaboration, local connections, and a platform for new works. Cairns Regional Council owns a charming old Queenslander set within the Botanic Gardens and across the street from the Tanks Arts Centre. It has been renovated to serve as accommodation for visiting creative people. And so Cairns Festival has begun inviting artists, curators, and cultural producers from throughout the world, and we're making a place for them to develop projects and collaborations in Cairns.Â

What do you most want people to know about the festival?

The part that is most important for me is that Cairns Festival is made possible by thousands of people — from the parade participants and local producers to the international musicians and visiting artists in residence. It's people like the crew at the Tanks, the staff at the Esplanade, and all of our generous sponsors who make the Festival shine. There are dozens of generous sponsors, wonderful media partners, and local businesses who support what we do. Without them all, we would have no events, no program, no creative spark. Each and every person involved in Cairns Festival brings something special to our stages, to our streets, and to our lives. So I want them to know how grateful we are for contributing their human spirit and that sense of unlimited creativity. Their presence, quite simply, is what gives Cairns Festival its soul. And that too is what sets our community's celebration apart form all the other festivals around the world.

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