James Mackenzie has masterminded Zoo Venues since 2000. Specialising in Theatre & Dance, Zoo is a multi-venue operator, and prides itself on technical support to artists, and no-hidden cost dealing. A leading presence amidst the mid-size operators during August in Edinburgh, Fringe-goers are very likely to find themselves visiting one, or both, of Zoo’s two multi-space hubs, Playground, and Southside. James was kind enough to sit down with me earlier in the year to discuss the philosophy of the organisation, his hopes, and visions for the future of the world’s Festival city.
Zoo Venues Ltd
Shows from 5th – 28th August
For further details click here.
Comments from me: Italics
James Mackenzie: bold
So, your philosophy as an organisation?
The best way of answering that is to give you the reason why we started the venue, which is all of us worked in and around the festival, and we felt that there was a need for a venue that was a bit more focused on what the companies themselves needed. Particularly in terms of technical support or presenting their work.
We also want to give those companies the support to present their work properly, because the professional companies that are coming to the Fringe, are coming there to sell their work to other people.
Flexible, bespoke support for artists
It’s a big supermarket to them, and if they’re coming, and they can’t have the right lighting, or they can’t have a little bit of extra time to build a bit of set then the person seeing the show, isn’t seeing it as it should be seen; and that’s not a correct representation of their work. So that was kind of one of the reasons that we started the company.
I think now our philosophy is very much about supporting those larger companies to present the work in the way it should be seen. Alongside that, I’m giving a home to the emerging artists who we think might be the next big thing and, and supporting them through that journey.
Every company has a different need. We have to be kind of flexible around what it is that we can do to help them.
How would you distinguish yourselves from the other promoters or venues in the mix?
I think it probably goes back to what I’ve just said about philosophy. I think, I think we’re very company focused.
I think we offer a slightly different look on what we do. I mean, there are obviously other venues who are similar. I think that, I think what we specialize in a certain type of work that works well for us. That’s largely dance, physical theatre, and then, and then new writing, that’s our specialism, that’s what we, as a team understand.
I think it’s really important that we understand the shows we’re presenting. We don’t do comedy, because I’m not a comedy expert. I love comedy. I love going to watch it. I think it’s brilliant. I know what I like, but I’m not an expert. We present work that I, and the team understand and know, and that’s what we are.
It all goes back to that philosophy. I believe that support is what sets us apart from other people, and not everyone needs that, but for people who do, I think we’re the right place
And are there others operating in the Fringe space that you particularly admire?
That’s a very good question. I’m very good friends with most of them to be honest. We all do the same job and it’s a tricky, difficult job. I think the program at Summerhall is excellent. I liked the work at the Traverse. I love Gilded Balloon; it’s run by two fantastic women who I admire greatly. We worked with them last year on, on the joint projects in the car park, which was really great. We had a lot of fun working together and figuring out how to work together. It was good.
I also think of places like Greenside, who take people on their first step into the Fringe, and do a really good job of it and look after them well. That for me, the moat is the most important thing. Do you look after the people? All of those organizations do that in different ways. So, they’re the people, I’d probably say that I admire the most.
Covid blues? A lasting effect?
Obviously the first effect was that we had no income for two and a bit years. Obviously, as businesses, we have ongoing costs, even if we’re not in Edinburgh, running a festival, and so we had no way to pay for anything. Which has meant, alongside businesses in every field, having to take loans and all those kinds of things to get through it.
Bank Managers think it’s madness
It’s tricky when what you do only happens once a year, because you don’t have a steady income. A bank manager wants to know how much your bringing in every month and you say, ‘Well, it all comes in, in one go in August…’and they look at you like you’re mad. So that’s been really tricky, but there have been some positives.
We did ZOOTV in 2020 when no one else was really doing any digital, because I was bored and I needed something to do, and the team needed something. We just needed some focus and, and we did it and it was really good fun and quite successful. Then last year, obviously we did the Multi-story, that was very, very challenging in terms of scale, as a brand-ne venue, the timeframe we had to do it in, and dealing with the restrictions. And I think that we placed quite a high emphasis on making sure the audience felt safe and we kept 1.5m distancing and bubbled the audience: all of those things. It’s a lot of extra work, and we only got the go-ahead mid-June!
So that’s a month and a half to plan an entirely new site!
But I still see it as a positive, it’s something that came out of adversity and it was fun to try and do something different. I think we all learned a lot, and it was really great collaborating with other partners.
I like collaboration. It’s fun. It’s challenging at times, but I think it’s fun. It was good that the Scottish government and Edinburgh City Council chose to fund it, to allow it to happen, because it clearly couldn’t have happened without that money.
How can operators work best to re-establish the Fringe in 2022?
Well I think it’s, it’s two-fold with: we have two stakeholders that we need to get back. We need to get the companies who want to come back. They’ve had, for most, a two-year disruption to the usual pattern. Some of them may have decided that actually Edinburgh is not for them anymore and the festivals are not for them. That’s not what we’re seeing: it looks like people are wanting to come back, but I think there is some of that going on.
The bigger challenge is to get the audiences back. We don’t know if they’re coming back: we presume they will, but you we don’t know! It’s challenging. We’ve had time to take stock, we need to change some of the ways we do things; I hope we have.
Calls for Change
There’s been a lot of talk, I’m sure you’re aware of this kind of, ‘The Fringe needs to change’, and all this kind of stuff. I actually think the Fringe changes every year. I just think it does it in small increments, but I don’t think it’s about one massive leap. I think it’s about going in the right direction, little by little, every year.
There’s lots going on all the time to change things for the better, but, I think we just need to convince the right companies, to make sure the work is quality, and people want to see it.
We need to encourage audiences to have faith to come back. I’m sure there are some audiences who are not going to want to sit in a tiny room with 50 other people; they’re just not going to want to, and we all know that that is the majority of fringe venues.
So, it’s going to be interesting to see how people feel about it all.
And do you have a vision for the Fringe of the further future?
Yeah, I think it’s quite clear that we need to open the access. We need to remove the barriers of entry to the festival for some people. Largely that means money. We need to find a sustainable future for the Fringe, it’s not particularly so at the minute.
The model is based on a lot of people working extremely hard for not great pay, and even that’s up and down. That’s from running the venues, to the people ripping the tickets. I think we need to look at how we bring more cash in to allow more people to enjoy it. Ultimately it’s sad to say it, but it does come down to money.
Pandemic funding shows the way forward
And if anything, the gateway process last year, and the funding…it was an extraordinary year…Fringe venues have never been funded before…the Fringe has never been funded before. All of a sudden there was this money, and artists weren’t been charged a million quid to go, and people’s accommodation was paid for.
Suddenly there’s this whole new model of what it could be. I understand that when you scale that up, it becomes incredibly expensive to do that, but I still think that is where we need to head. We need to head to a place where, not entirely, because it can self-sustain itself — we’ve proved that — but where there is some investment from government and council into something that brings in a huge amount of money to the local economy, I think it needs to be valued, and that’s across all the local festivals.
That’s not just the Fringe. You know, the Edinburgh International Festival is receiving a huge amount of public subsidy, and the amount of people they bring to the city is tiny compared to the Fringe. The question is economically, why is the Fringe not receiving that amount of public subsidy to bring an even larger number?
Funding, there’s no way around it
So, I think, I think there needs to be a balancing across all the festivals. It’s going to be vitally important, because if we want a better Fringe, if we want better rates of pay, if we want, artists to be able to come regardless of their backgrounds and financial positions, then we need to do that.
At the minute there’s no money in the system. No-one in the system is making a fortune, despite what some people think. Yes, a lot of money changes hands, but it all gets spent. So, that’s what I want the festivals to be in the future.
I think everyone understands this, and sadly that probably means public money or maybe commercial sponsorship on a bigger scale, or more likely a combination of all of it, but that’s what we need to move towards. We all know where we want to get to, and I think we’re clear that everyone agrees with that, but it’s how we get there.
Ultimately someone always ends up paying for it, and that’s what we’ve got to convince funders, and government to do, because if they do that, the festival will grow in a way that everyone can be proud of.
It is an astonishing event, and we need to make sure it’s still there in 20 years.
Edinburgh, the largest arts festival in the world, is it’s position secure, does it have to work to stay there? Must it change?
That was about the idea that there might be other festivals that were going to take away Edinburgh’s crown, and I still think there might be. Places that are willing to pay for it, or make it cheap to run; you don’t have to give cash, if you make a accommodation cheap, or you make venue rents cheap.
But it is possible that some big players might go, ‘It’s too hard, I don’t want to do it anymore’ …they don’t want to, and the only reason they’re still here is because they love the festival and they love the city. It’s a very emotional connection that everyone involved has to it, but ultimately businesses have to survive.
If there’s a better offer somewhere else, they will eventually go somewhere else.
Over-tourism, what do you think?
I understand the concerns. None of us enjoy being in the city when millions of people are in our way when we just want to get to the shops.
I understand that for some people, the festivals, aren’t what they enjoy and that they just find it an irritant. I think it’s about how we communicate with those groups. I think we need to make the case that it’s good for the city in terms of financial investment; we need to be clear that it’s not just the Fringe, because I think sometimes the Fringe gets the blame for everything.
Confusing city tourists with Fringe-goers
If I walked down Princes Street, I’m probably seeing a majority of people who are just tourists coming to look at the castle. They’re not here to look at the Fringe at all. So, I think it’s about how we communicate that; listening to people and finding out what their key concerns are, not just over-tourism, but you know, if they highlight some other concern, then seeing if there is a way, all of us in the community can make that better. That might be noise, that might be spreading the festival out to make foot-fall in certain areas, lesser. I think all of those things, are things we can do.
We understand for some people, it’s all an inconvenience, we get that, but that also, the city is vibrant and has an income because of it. My grandparents used to live in York and they had those self-same complaints in the summer, which is you can’t get to the shops!
There was no festival on there, just a lot of generally Japanese and American tourists loving the city!
The Fringe, not over-subscribed, but probably hyper-concentrated?
It’s exactly that. You know, one of the things we tried to do with the multi-story was to move stuff to a different part of town.
Favourite acts of the past?
The first that comes to mind…my staff always find this amusing is there was a show, from Spitfire Company from the Czech Republic called ‘One Step Before the Fall’, which was astonishing…so astonishing. We had it twice, about five years apart; just the most beautiful piece.
I think that one will always stick with me personally. We’ve worked with the company a lot, we’ve become good friends. The link to Czech work is quite strong for us, we’ve presented a lot of it. I’ve made a lot of friends in Prague.
Thinking of other things, so many over the years…the first ever ‘Potted Potter’ happened in our tiny studio!
J.K. Rowling vs Potted Potter
I remember the cease-and-desist letters from JK Rowling’s lawyers; and all the fun of that. Then these two, you know, really young guys going, ‘Oh no, we’ve got a letter!’, and me saying, ‘Just do it guys. It’ll be fine.‘
Then, of course, being really nervous…now it’s this Global phenomenon and tours the world. Another which sticks in the mind is Bryony Kimmings’ first show, Sex Idiot. I will always remember receiving a hand-written application from Bryony, saying, ‘here’s a show I’ve written called Sex Idiot. It’s about how I got an STI and had to contact all my ex-lovers.’
I was reading and thinking, this is either genius or definitely the worst idea in the world. So I rang her, and we had a chat, and within 20 minutes I was like, ‘Ok you’ve convinced me,’ and the rest is history; Bryony’s now in Hollywood movies!
It’s always those ones. It’s those ones where you feel like you’ve played a part in the beginning of something. That’s what the Fringe has always been about. Supporting those artists in their first little baby steps on the way, just never ceases to put a smile on my face.
Artists you’re already excited about for this year?
Yeah! There’s Ontroerend Goed coming back (when we spoke in February, most of these were still in negotiation still) …there’s a lot of Danish work coming this year as part of the Danish showcase which was meant to be coming to us in 2020. So, it’s nice to finally get a chance to present the work.
We’ve got a guy called Graeme Leak, who was meant again to be with us in 2020, and in the interim time we’ve presented his 8-hour long video ethic as part of his ZOOTV from his farm. We’ve created a relationship with him over the last two years, and it’s really nice to finally get him in a room, after all of the digital. and all of the phones.
Overall, there’s some really stunning work. We are still slightly at an early stage, but we programme pretty late, because we want to make sure that we’re getting the best things, and that’s what we’re going to date.
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