Lifting the Fringe: Giles Agis – Carnival & Community Manager

Giles Agis, former CEO of Brouhaha International, and the current Edinburgh Festival Carnival Manager, is the human responsible for bringing Carnival to the streets of Edinburgh. One of only 3 organisations with a statutory mandate to march the streets of Auld Reekie, The Edinburgh Festival Carnival is a unique day in the Festivals calendar, and so popular that Giles is faced with having to turn people away.

Edinburgh Festival Carnival
Sunday 17 July 2022
1-3pm Parade from the top of the Mound to the West End of Princes Street
3-6pm Princes Street Gardens – Ross Bandstand
FREE
For further details click here.

Prompts from me: Italics
Giles Agis: bold

In-person Festivals, what an innovation!…

I mean for those of us who thrive off live events, it’s all about that, that interconnectivity between human beings; we’ve been forced into the digital world.

Much as that can be an interesting space to inhabit, it doesn’t resonate the same as person-to-person, or community-to-community, or group-to-group experience. People, particularly funders, like hold up the virtual space for interconnectivity and the place where people meet, but like really?!

It was interesting in 2021, because we were able to deliver a lot of workshops for young people and children and communities, but without audiences. So, we delivered a lot of work; do check out the Edinburgh Festival Carnival on YouTube, you’ll see the 2021 content.

I mean, instead of inviting all our international partners, we just sent them the money and said, ‘film something and send it to us!’ So they filmed all their performances and workshops, which was lovely, but if I can’t get 25,000 people on the street for carnival this year, I’m gonna end up in a monastery. I’m just going to retire. I’ll do a Reggie Perrin, and leave my shoes on a beach.

So, your philosophy as an organisation?

Right, well if I can just give you a little bit context… So, obviously the Ed Festival Carnival has evolved from what was the cavalcade many years ago. Then the Jazz & Blues Festival took it up. It’s 10 years this year, I think, since I was contacted by Roger Spence, then director of the Jazz &Blues Festival, who’s since passed away.

He’d found out about a company, I was running in Liverpool: Brouhaha International, and we did the local carnival and international work. He basically hired us to come in, bring all the costumes etc. It was the case that at that time of year, we had all our international groups in Liverpool and we had four coaches bus up to Edinburgh in a day, like 200 participants, did the gigs and come back.

That was great.

Out of the Frying Pan, into the Home Office

I left Brouhaha four years ago because it really wasn’t putting me in a healthy situation. It was too stressful; I got to do all the boring jobs, all the necessary evils that no one else wants to do: Spreadsheets, contracts, etc.

Then the role came on in Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival for the Carnival & Community manager. So I started in January of 2020, and then six weeks later I was told to work from home of course. It’s been a mix of home working and various visits to, to Edinburgh over the last 18 months.

**Scenes from past Carnivals…from Edinburgh Festival Carnival on Facebook**

Jazz, Blues, and Carnival?

It’s quite interesting, you’ve got Edinburgh Jazz & Blues festival who obviously produce and run the Edinburgh Festival Carnival, of which I’m the committee manager. So, you have primarily a jazz and blues festival, which is ticketed. It’s a paid ticketed festival.

Then you have Edinburgh Festival Carnival that has a free cultural offer for children, young people, families, and communities, and is not ticketed.

So you have these very, very two different entities, and what’s been quite an interesting experience over the last six to eight months is trying to work out well, how do we relate? You also have like five staff at Edinburgh Jazz & Blues. Then you’ve got me! It’s like, how do these two things interconnect?

When you think about it, the art forms themselves of jazz and blues and carnival come from very similar roots; they come from, you know, roots of people of colour. So that makes sense. The challenge though, is to find the synergy and the crossover and the communality between this and a paid festival, with an aging audience; I would say predominantly white, with expendable income to buy tickets.

Then you have a carnival audience, which is very, very diverse; very young. It’s a challenge, it’s interesting. How do these things come together? So, my particular philosophy on what I do…well I grew up in the 70’s, and the early 80’s. I am that old, I’m 60!

Child of the Thatcher years…

I grew up with a Thatcher government. I grew up with social political change. I grew up with…every weekend was a demo. I grew up with meeting all my peers in that political, social-cultural environment. As a teenager, discovering the beginnings of Grey Eye Theatre, disability arts, Black Theatre Co-op, Gay Sweat Shop, a wonderful company called Cunning Stunts, a female collective.

It was all this crazy time.

Also, I was into punk, like Rage against the Machine. so that informed the bedrock of my cultural, political stance. So, my take is very much about trying to engineer a much more social, culturally democratic model of the way in which culture is defined and made.

The pursuit of funding…not excellence

Which makes me ask, who gets funding, who chooses?

One of the most bankrupt words I find in the cultural festival sector is ‘excellence’. If anyone talks to me about excellence, I like won’t hire them. The other one is curatorial. You say that in an interview out, you go mate. Sorry. I’m being a bit over the top now, but you can kind of get the vibe of where I’m coming from.

So, my last 40 years has been about trying to lead from the back and engineer situations, cultural partnerships, more strategic partnerships with funders, which are about ensuring that voices that are least heard within the festival sector, so they can be heard and resonate. The wonderful thing about Carnival for that one day of the year, people can virtually do what they want and get away with it.

Edinburgh the Festival city, but only for some?

I think what really inspires me about doing what I do in Edinburgh, which has only been a couple of years now, is that it feels like a city that has so many communities, and areas of the city who are actually really wanting to embrace festivals that haven’t necessarily had the opportunity or the access.

So now is about readdressing that imbalance, but not in a way that negates what’s already there, you know? There is room for all these things, but what I strive towards is creating a balance; a balance of opportunity, a balance of visibility of things that people don’t always see all the time.

We can do that within the Festival Carnival, cause we now are in the position where we have a year round program of arts engagement work. We can develop pieces of work with different artists, in different spaces and context

Where does the Festival Carnival fit within the larger Festivals ecosystem?

I think primarily, I relate to people as human beings and that’s the main thing. Somebody can be working in a festival that might be considered high art rather than popular art. I’m the kind of person who wants to know why people get out of bed in the morning. It’s one of my questions I ask all the artists I come across. What gets you out of bed in the morning? What floats your boat? What inspires you? What impresses you? What emboldens you…what, what is it about? Cause we’re not in this gig to make money.

We’re not gonna become rich and famous, you know?

Now, Edinburgh Jazz & Blues festival is part of the festivals group, the seven festivals, et cetera. We are the smallest festival in terms of turnover, staffing…but I think we punch above our weight continually.

Diversity breeds Flexibility

I just think we’re, in some ways, quite a diverse team. I think we are very flexible in what we can do; so we can be proactive rather than reactive. In terms of other festivals, I’ve not had a great deal of, of contact with people, primarily cause of Covid. However, I’ve kept up with what other festivals are doing. I always want to push the social cultural agenda towards readdressing the balance in terms of power, in terms of resources that go into different festivals.

I want to see a wider range of people being engaged and employed. I want to see, for want of a better word, but I want to see people of colour. I want to see people with invisible and visible disabilities. I want to see working class artists, you know, engaged in all those activities. Unfortunately things are not as good as they could be.

I also would like to see better gender equality in terms of the echelons of management within festivals. So, there’s all those inequalities that still need some development.

Pulling up the Ladder?

One of the, one of the little stories I’ll give is when I was presenting with 3 young artists at The Scottish Storytelling Centre. It was Wednesday night or Tuesday night. One of the young artists Maggie was a great dancer. She was saying she had an aspiration to be a teacher to, to facilitate dance, to teach…but couldn’t work. She had to work in hospitality.

She said, ‘You people hold onto your jobs for far too long. You inhabit those jobs till you pension out. Where are the opportunities for the young and up and coming…the next generation of creatives? I mean, there are some there, but it’s difficult. It’s difficult for our generation.’

There’s training, there’s education, there’s university, there’s all the training and capacity building. Then there’s this point when you’ve gotta pay the bills. There’s a mis-connect between finishing that development, and accessing professional jobs? There’s no ladder. It’s been pulled up a bit.

Don’t get me started on unpaid internships. That’s all I’m gonna say.

However what’s been really good is we’ve taken a couple of young people on the kickstart scheme. I’ve got a young man with me now, he’s in a band, he’s a drummer; he’s gonna shine. He’s going to hit the ground running, it’s great to have that. He’s got energy.

I’ve had three days with him and I think I blew his mind a bit. We had18 meetings in three days! I also offered him to go to Brasil for six weeks to train with a Drum company?

He was amazed.

Any other operators in the Festivals sphere you particularly admire?

There’s a guy, Morgan Njobo, he does The African Connections Festival. I like what he’s doing. His partner, Beata, is in the city council as a diversity officer: She’s great. I’ve just come off from Zoom with her and already our heads are in 2023!

This summer’s done now, of course.

I also admire Lisa Williams from the Caribbean Association, she’s really dynamic, much more of academia rather than the festivals sphere, but she’s doing a lot of work…we’re bringing carnival into the National Trust in Scotland; trying to get young people engaged in what they do.

Finding new audiences

I think a lot of the festivals, I mean, obviously through Scottish Government funding, a lot of festivals are now working on, and have been working for a number of years on their engagement activities, and strategies for developing new audiences, audiences that they haven’t maybe thought about before.

I think that’s really been interesting, because from the Festivals presentation last week, you could see that a lot of the festivals, the Art Festival, the Children’s Festival, were really starting to re reimagine what it actually means for them to work with communities citywide; in areas that haven’t maybe been so well served.

Got them Covid blues?

Obviously, we had to go into a kind of hybrid digital verse, with some limited live. I can see the learning experience was very good in terms of trying things we’ve never done. A few years ago, you couldn’t have conceived anything carnival being done digitally!

The Pandemic highlights inequalities

Yet, there was some learning to do, that was another place and space to inhabit. I think we can kind of learn from that. I also think the pandemic exposed, many of the inequalities that we were all aware of, but it really brought them to the fore-front.

I’m hoping that that has had an impact on the other festivals as well, whether it be Black Lives Matter, whether it be #MeToo, whether it be the way in which disabled people were sent home and told to stay there, or anyone who’s vulnerable.

No one can deny that, no matter how much the politicians told us the virus affected everyone: it didn’t. It affected communities who don’t have resources, it affected people who have underlying health conditions.

I think a lot of people in the festival sector went, okay, we need to address this. We need to have some change here. I think it made all the festivals even more determined to create change. When I talk to some of the other festival engagement workers, though we haven’t had a huge amount of connectivity, I think we find underlying values and the kind of political beliefs there have been strengthened. That maybe will play out in the next couple of years, but let’s see.

Ambitions for this year’s festivities?

A new permanent home for the Edinburgh Festival Carnival

A few things. One of them is to build on the all-year-round engagement we have with are young people, communities, et cetera. The carnival will always be a platform for presenting and disseminating creative work that has stemmed from the arts engagement program. So, that involves static presentations in Princes Street Gardens, after the parade showcases all that work in a mobile form.

I’m very happy we are about to find a home for Carnival! It’s the first time we’ve had a space to be able to make work with artists and to upcycle/recycle a lot of our costumes. We’re moving on the 25th of April. We’re moving into Ocean Terminal to the old Debenhams, as part of the Living Memory Collective. There will be at least 20 or 30 community arts organizations in that building.

Widening inclusion this year

I’m hoping to ensure that we engage a much wider range of communities in this year’s event. One of the challenges I have is, we are only allowed 800 people in the parade. It’s in the license and I’m struggling to get below that.

There comes a point of critical mass when you almost shoot yourself in the foot in that you are potentially engaging in a much wider and broader way. You’re increasing your participation, those who take part rather than audiences. I just get the feeling that there’s going to be lots of people wanting to do this and we’re going to have be careful, and disappoint people.

The Carnival is going to get bigger…much bigger

Going forwards, then, I see the Carnival growing and becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. Now the one which you always come up against is traffic management, because roads were built for buses and trams and cars, and how dare you as human beings venture onto the road and say the road is ours for these three hours on one day of the year?

Well, actually, people in the city have a right. I mean, it’s weird because I think us, Hogmanay, and The Edinburgh March Riding Association, are the only three events that have a charter from the city where we have the right to march, we have the right to parade.

Every time you quote that to the councillor, they’re like, oh really? Oh, okay.

How best to re-establish live festival fun?

I believe there is a kind of reawakening and opening up of the festival sector. One of the things that fortunately we’ve had this year is we were able to roll our last EU grants over from 2020 to 2022.

Sending young artists overseas

We were also fortunate enough to be able to have other funding from the Tourism Fund, which is the replacement for the Erasmus Plus, so we are sending 28 Edinburgh-based Scottish young artists to: South Africa, Zambia, Gar of a Costa Rica, Trinidad, Cuba, Brazil, USA and Trinidad for two months to learn in arts organizations, to take art in festivals and carnivals, to then come back inspired and re-develop their skills in a different community context.

Inspiring local children with International visitors

I think that internationalism has played a really, really important part in developing the work of our Carnival over the last few years. From May 1^st, we’ll have 18 international young artists from those countries for three months here, doing engagement, work with children, young people and communities, and really bringing something fresh.

Imagine you are in a primary school in West Lothian, and you suddenly have a South African dancer and a Costa Rican acrobat working with you on stuff. It’s different. It’s good. It’s healthy. It’s positive.

Tell me about this year’s programme, who, or what would you highlight?

Let’s go local first. So, I’m working with a young music producer called Niko Kisitu. he’s been working in a place called The Passion Project, which is working with young people from the Edinburgh community on hip hop production, on music production, working with children, young people, building their skills for recording and for live work.

He’s leaving for Ghana soon, with two other musicians from Edinburgh to do the two months that we talked about. I think he’s one of the next generation of cultural…what you would say, entrepreneurs…leaders.

Recruiting the youngest board member in Festivals history?

Then there’s Arwen Seilman. She was presenting in our 2021 carnival. She’s also part of the GB tap team. She works for Tap Attack, but she’s also a percussionist and leads a youth band called Pulse of the Place in Edinburgh.

She’s spoken for Ted talks and for the World Health Organization. She’s only 17 and she’s inspirational. I’m trying to get her to become an Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival board member. How many boards of the festivals have young people represented on them? It’s mostly white men over 60, like myself?

She’s a young woman of Indian Scottish heritage, she’s so inspirational.

Bringing some Cuban sabor

In terms of internationals, we’ve got some really lovely, wonderful performers coming. We have the Cuban national dance champions, Oniel Semanat and Regla Ibarra Bandera, only 25, and 23. They’re coming in with the rest of the international teachers, and are going to be kicking up a storm in Edinburgh; running sessions, doing workshops. They’re working with a local organiser, Albi Mendoza to run an inclusive dance event, Latin Inclusive, which embraces people with additional needs, their families, and carers.

They will be a huge performance part of the carnival!

There are 18 invited acts, and they all have really interesting kind of profiles and perspectives. There’s South African Mthetheleli Dlakavu, Siphosetu Gojo, extraordinary dancers, and yoga teachers.

I think our relationship with Artscape in South Africa and Cape town has been 20 years. So many of these international relationships have built over time and it often feels like it’s just family. There are always lots of interesting possibilities.

Memories of Carnivals past?

I remember going to Glastonbury in 1983, it was very interesting; as we arrived, this tractor turned up with a trailer because we were exhibiting there with an installation and the tractor turned up and the driver said, ‘right, where do you want to go?’

They just took us to a space and it was very, very flexible and very accessible and the tickets cost virtually nothing. IT was a very different entity to which it is now.

In terms of the Ed festival Carnival, I think of 2019, the last time we were able to hold it live. It felt like that one day the city was alive, and on the roads, on the streets with so many different groups. We ended the festival with a large celebratory piece on the Ross bandstand with dancers and musicians. You can find this all online on our YouTube channel. It was a really nice local, and international collaboration.

Where do you think the Festival city should be headed longer term?

That’s really hard because I think that that with the two years of the pandemic…this question was actually raised during the education committee showcase about the future. I said to the audience, I said, ‘I dunno about anyone else. I’ve found it really hard to imagine the future because we’ve been living week to week, month to month.‘

It’s almost like those ambitions, and those goals have kind of been on hold, but now with a change of circumstances, I think we can begin to dare to reimagine what the future might hold.

Art as a response to Draconian legislation

There are two future scenarios. There’s one that’s very Orwellian, and doesn’t look good. One in terms of the increasing poverty that families are existing within. Draconian legislation that’s coming in against human rights and freedoms and liberties.

So, there’s that side of it. But if you pitch against that, the resilience and the creativity that people have, it’s a very different picture. I hope and have my fingers crossed that that our Carnival plays part of making that future.

Accommodation, an increasing participation barrier?

I don’t really know what the future is. We are operating in an environment which is all about capital and the accumulation of that. We don’t seem to have any alternative structure, or way of doing business.

You know, there is a certain amount of barter and leeway, but at the end of the day, we have to pay for things. I just don’t know if there is another more equitable way of doing this. I had a conversation with the guy on the Kickstart recently…

His family is from Italy, he was born in Scotland. He was saying that, in Italy, they will close a road at a drop of a hat. They will not charge for anything, you know, because the carnival in Italy is so much part the fabric, the culture of society; the council will just sort it.

It won’t be like when I sit in a Council meeting and meet resistance. They’ll say, ‘That’s not possible. That’s not doable.’ Don’t get me wrong the people that I’m working alongside are really, really supportive and helpful, but they have line managers and others to be accountable to.

They may have a politic, which suggests all we’re doing should be free; but that’s not the case. I quite like to think, and dream there will be an easier way, but let’s see. I’ll just keep buying the lottery ticket on Friday!

On the calls of over-tourism?

Yeah, The Place program was brought in because I think there is an understanding from the Scottish Government that Festivals could feel as if they were not for locals.

I still get people saying, ‘Those festivals are not for us. They’re for tourists and visitors; it’s not for us locals, it’s not for the communities. I can perfectly empathize. I’ve seen it down here – I live in Liverpool, work in Edinburgh. So, this happens here, if in a smaller context.

But…I don’t see all these complaints coming from people in Drylaw, or the communities around. You’re talking about very city-centre based people; people that maybe have a certain economic and social demographic. Obviously you can understand there is disruption, but on the other hand, you know, the city has to think, well, how are we gonna pay for our schools? How are we gonna pay for our care for the elderly? How are we gonna pay for our services that we have a statuary care of duty to do? You know, we have to have an income as a city. We have to be able to pay for these things.

If people complain, they’ll be experiencing lots of difficulties because of noise, or rubbish, or too many bodies. But at the end of the day, a city’s got to balance the books and it’s got a duty of care to its communities.

How’s it going to do that? You know, as, as a country, we don’t make anything anymore; we’re not producers. It all comes from China and other countries. So, the one thing we have is the cultural sector, which is a major, major economic driver and producer.

Would you like your Council tax to treble?

How many city-centre people rent out their places for extortionate amounts of money and leave.

It’s not a year-round phenomenon.