ARTISTS, POLITICS AND FESTIVALS
An industry-wide approach to enabling artistic expression
Festivals have long been centred around freedom of expression, but this year has seen event operators come under an unprecedented level of hostility for booking outspoken artists. In response to widespread concern among festival operators about how to cope with the challenges involved, LIVE is developing shared guidance on supporting artistic expression at festivals and venues. Access investigates.
Many festival operators that AAA has spoken to strongly believe in a fundamental right to artistic freedom of expression for every performer at their events, and that a cancel culture is not the way forward.
Asked by the BBC about Kneecap remaining on Glastonbury Festival’ s lineup this year, Emily Eavis said,“ There have been a lot of very heated topics this year but we remain a platform for many artists from all over the world, and everyone is welcome here.”
Shambala Festival’ s co-founder Chris Johnson says that while huge festivals such as Glastonbury have broad support networks, controversy can be an intimidating prospect for smaller events teams:“ Shambala is an independent festival that has stood for what we believe in, which is the point of the festival – it’ s not a money-making machine – but when looking to make a controversial booking such as Kneecap it does cause a dilemma.
“ We saw the significant fallout from the Glastonbury booking, the secret letters, the political pressure, the vicious social media campaigns from organised groups. So as an independent festival, it feels daunting. We ' re really in conflict between our belief in supporting artistic expression and what we can cope with as a team. We need to create some resilience and operate as a community of festivals, and artists, to support each other in enabling free expression.”
With a membership that covers every corner of the live music business,
LIVE CEO Jon Collins Glastonbury supports free speech
industry body LIVE has enabled multifaceted discussions on the topic, drawing in expertise from across the industry, and is now working on a guidance document for festivals and venues that will be made available early next year.
“ The challenge on this topic is that we ' re trying to bring calm, dispassionate, nuanced analysis to an area where all those things can go out the window very quickly in a national and social media back and forth,” says LIVE CEO Jon Collins.“ We ' re very conscious of the environment that exists beyond the control of festivals, venues, promoters, agents, managers and artists.
“ Within LIVE we have expert groups covering areas such as festivals and venues. We have integrated the discussion around artistic expression into our meetings and discovered a real commonality of approach in terms of what both festival organisers and venue operators think about these things, and how they look to deal with issues such as heightened media interest, political noise, whatever it may be.
“ Our industry has a proud history of giving voices to the voiceless from the stage, amplifying causes, and amplifying messages. The guidance document will help outline if it ' s safe and legal for an artist to do that. Once you know it ' s going to be legal, what are the safety considerations? Once that is handled, then it should become business as usual. We ' ve got vastly experienced people running our festivals large and small, and across venues, who are thinking about the security considerations. They are used to running risk assessments taking into account what an artist might do on stage, and what response it might elicit. The systems and processes are there to enable that to happen. What we want to do with the guidance is use our relationships with central government, with local government, and with the police representative bodies, to say,‘ this is how we deal with these things’. So, when there is an artist coming and there is a media storm around that artist, let ' s have a consistently sensible conversation about how we handle it.”
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