Festivals and Producing

From 1998, whilst lecturing at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, Paul Iles devised and taught a Masters’ programme in the expanding field of arts festivals and producing. The degree is now led by Douglas Brown, one of its first students.

Concerned with both theoretical and practical studies including  historical perspectives, study includes the motives for festivals from Salzburg to St Magnus, the definition of a festival city, categories of festival, entrepreneurship and the commissioning of new work, the duty to experiment, cross artform collaborations, international management matters and curating, the integration of festivals into the local arts scene, festival audiences, marketing and impacts, corporate sponsorship and the festival 'advantage', foreign policy, internationalism, globalisation and cultural tourism, and European Capitals of Culture.

Edinburgh is the perfect city for festival case studies; offering advantage to arts managers' careers, especially those wanting to be programmers and curators. This degree was not the first in the now proliferating provision of cultural management and producing studies in British universities – the discipline descends from 1967 when Anthony Field, then finance director at the Arts Council of Great Britain, proposed a syllabus for a short course in arts administration at the Regent Street Polytechnic, London. Soon, City University offered the first degrees from 1973.  However, the Queen Margaret MA, which significantly was until recently located in a vocational drama school, was the first to specialise in festivals, producing and programming. Later, Edinburgh Napier University offered an MSc in International Event and Festival Management in their Institute for Festival & Event Management.

Paul Iles was a member of the management team for the 1988 Adelaide Festival, under artistic director Lord Harewood. This was the most exhilarating event in Australia's Bicentennial, staging 529 performances with 70+ companies in three weeks, including Peter Brook's Mahabharata,  the Noh Theatre, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Twyla Tharp Dance Company. Earlier in Adelaide, when general manager of the State Theatre Company, Paul was a visiting lecturer at the South Australia Institute for Technology arts management programme at the Elton Mayo School of Management, which offered Australia's first qualifications in the subject, developed by Peter Brokensha, Len Amadio and Elizabeth Sweeting.