Nicola Benedetti, the Grammy-winning violinist, has revealed that next year’s Edinburgh international festival will feature many more shows where the barriers between audiences and artists will be removed.
She said next August’s festival, featuring a revival of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen in its original form, would include numerous shows similar in thinking to a Hungarian production this year in which the audience sat on beanbags among the orchestra.
That community spirit, she added, was exemplified by the opening event at this year’s festival, when 500 amateur and professional musicians played multiple open-airshows in the gardens beneath Edinburgh Castle.
Benedetti, who last year became the first woman and the first Scot to direct the Edinburgh international festival, said those productions “landed incredibly well” with festivalgoers.
Many that she spoke to “resoundingly” felt they needed shared experiences with much less formality, where traditional relationships – the audience in seats and performers on a stage – were either less rigid or dissolved.
“I think that’s a height of human achievement, the fact that thousands of people can silently and intensely listen and perceive and watch together, for me that’s something to protect,” she said.
“But what I’m saying is that there is a greater diversity of how we can present art forms; to have a level of freedom around that is something we are embracing.”
In a break with the tradition of doing so when its programme is launched each spring, the festival has announced well in advance that the main theme for next year’s season will be “rituals that unite us”.
Benedetti said that strand was designed to reinforce the sense of community and shared experience that beanbag-style productions would help promote; it also built on this year’s theme: “Where do we go from here?”
“When we speak to rituals, when we speak to something that unites us, we’re not speaking about being united around a shared singular, that’s the opposite of what our festival is there to do; our festival is there to reconcile a myriad of opposing beliefs,” she said.
The festival would “have to be hiding” and failing to show empathy if it did not respond to the often divisive “energetic forces at play around the world” by offering festivalgoers the opportunity for something unifying and uplifting.
The production of Carmen, by the French company Opéra-Comique at the Festival Theatre, is very closely based on its original staging in Paris in 1875 and features seven iron doors made for the show by Gustave Eiffel, designer of the eponymous tower.
A second show announced in the preview will be a modern dance work Assembly Hall by the Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, in which a group of medieval re-enactors gather for their annual general meeting, only for ancient customs to re-emerge as they debate the need for radical changes to their organisation.
The “rituals that unite us” theme has been inspired, the festival said, by the writing of Byung-Chul Han, a Korean-German cultural theorist who argues that new shared rituals are needed to bind communities together, particularly in the social media age.
Benedetti said formal concert settings, with the audience seated and the production on its stage, were still essential. They embodied “the humility and curiosity [where] you’re looking to see what has somebody else created and what somebody else is telling me.”
In another move away from its historic focus on traditional performance arts, the international festival is also collaborating in a Scottish ballet season called Healing Arts Scotland with the World Health Organization and 11 arts and cultural organisations to promote “improved physical, mental and social health through the arts”.
The 2024 Edinburgh international festival will run from 2 August to 25 August
