It all started with home-grown talent, of course. Circus Burlesque’s slightly shambolic big top show was the centre-piece of the first Stockton Riverside Festival in August 1988. The circus, and a magnificent swan constructed out of withies by a local team of artists. The swan was processed to the Riverside on a gloriously blue-skied day, becoming the precursor to the Festival’s Community Carnival. Not that anyone was thinking about precursors or sequels in the hectic build up to the festival. The idea that it might become an annual event stemmed from the terrific public reaction to the event. Several thousand people turned up just to see the swan placed on the River Tees that evening, without a single firework as an inducement.
With a large amount of beginner’s luck we were onto something, so in 1989 there was another Riverside Festival, this time with Cumbria’s Welfare State International providing a spectacular finale. I must admit that at the time I had only the haziest notion of Welfare State’s truly international significance as innovators in the field of outdoor events. They did a great, sprawling, ruinously expensive monster of a performance, whose highlight was the passage down river of a boat loaded with pyrotechnics towards a bridge made out of scaffolding and wire. As the boat drew level with our VIPs (who were on the upper decks of a hulk laughingly described as a ‘floating night club’) a misfire caused all of the pyro to go off at once. The result was a ringside seat at something akin to an amphibious assault, with rockets streaking only a few metres above people’s heads. The Stockton councillors who were among the VIPs must have been impressed, because starting in 1990 the Council took over financial responsibility for the festival, much to the relief of the board at the old Dovecot Arts Centre where I was director.
Stockton Riverside Festival had arrived as an annual event, but its content was still an open question. There were English companies who specialised in working outdoors, but not much in the way of English festivals, so I started to look to Europe for inspiration.
In the days before internet, email or mobile phones this was a bit more of an adventure than it is now, but by asking around I managed to locate likely events in Holland, France and Spain and off I went. I found inspiration and then some; outdoor festivals that were well organised, that took proper care of their artists as well as their public, but above all that presented performances of an ambition and technical sophistication that was literally breathtaking.
Our first international foray was Compagnie Malabar from France, with two shows that have proved so popular they’re still touring them! After 45 minutes of ghostly apparitions, Mad Max motorcycles and thunderous French rock music, the roar of approval that greeted the end of one show was all the confirmation was needed that the Stockton public could be cosmopolitan in its tastes. The festival became the Stockton International Riverside Festival, and over the next few years I was in the enviable position of being the only British shopper in a European supermarket of fantastic outdoor work. Companies such as La Burbuja, Xarxa and Artristras brought the liberating passion of Spanish fiesta to Stockton, while the likes of Generik Vapeur, Transe Express and Plasticiens Volants presented extraordinary visions which had come straight out of the imagination of their French creators.
These were times when the audience was growing as rapidly as the budget, so I was able to model the Festival on the kind of Mediterranean intensity I’d found in France and Spain – presenting a kaleidoscope of street theatre, circus, music, comedy and cabaret in only a few days within the confines of Stockton town centre. For a bunch of phlegmatic Northerners, Stockton folk do a pretty good impression of Latin enthusiasm, with little or no help from the local climate. Shivering off-duty Spaniards became a common sight around Stockton at festival time, and as the years went on they were joined in their search for new sweaters by artists from every continent, as the Festival became a gateway into the UK for scores of companies.
In truth, British shows had taken a back seat to the international work, but then the 1990s were hard times for street artists based in this country. Starved of resources, they were pushed towards the cheap and cheerful simply to survive, and it’s a tribute to the ingenuity of companies like Natural Theatre, Whalley Range All Stars and the Desperate Men they were able to make work of great wit and ingenuity on a shoestring. With some support from Northern Arts, companies in the region like Dodgy Clutch and Neighbourhood Watch took inspiration from what they’d seen at the festival and began to make outdoor work of a quality that enabled them to do their own international touring.
In 22 years there have been many changes, not only to the internal landscape of Stockton and its festival but also to national context in which the festival operates. The Festival is fortunate to have had an exemplary record in terms of accidents and public order incidents, but changes in Health and Safety legislation mean it is now subject to a planning process of a rigour undreamt of in 1988.
I suspect the reaction to Welfare State’s prematurely exploding fireboat would be very different in 2009! Still, thanks to the professionalism of colleagues within Stockton Council we remain committed to bringing the most extraordinary sights in outdoor performance to the Festival. Who can forget Theater Clipa’s ravishing aquatic dream in 2005, or last year’s flaming fire engine from Groupe F (courtesy of Cleveland Fire Brigade)? The Fringe Festival and Community Carnival have long added breadth and depth to the town’s ownership of its festival, and both are going from strength to strength. The town’s population has seen the most visible changes. Back in the day Stockton was a cosmopolitan place for a week a year at festival time. Now the Carnival’s participants are more diverse than the Festival programme could ever hope to be!
Visitors might not be aware of the fact, but changes in the national context have also had a profound impact on the Festival. Since the mid-1990s many other towns and cities have developed ‘proper’ outdoor festivals, and since the beginning of the new millennium Arts Council England has greatly increased its support for festivals and companies. This has benefitted Stockton International Riverside Festival hugely, not only in terms of direct support but also in terms of support for English artists. It didn’t take me long back in my early travelling days to realise that the wonderful French shows I’d discovered were the result of an enlightened cultural policy in France that put performances made for outdoors on a par with indoor work in terms of resources. It took me a while longer to understand that for a time in the 1970s English companies had been leaders and innovators in the field, till the cold winds of a very different cultural policy stifled development (an in fact caused an exodus of talent to the Continent).
In 2012 Stockton’s Festival will coincide with the major national celebrations which will take place to mark the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. We aim to ensure that SIRF is a key component of those celebrations, and to that end we are committed to doing everything possible to develop fantastic English and UK work that will sit alongside the best international companies. Highlights for SIRF 2009 include a major commission for The World Famous to re-animate Stockton’s historic Trinity Church, culminating in a spectacular Festival Finale on Sunday 2nd August. Also at Trinity, the UK’s leading circus company, No Fit State, present the world premiere of “Park Life” which will challenge local people with all kinds of sporting and other skills to find out whether they can be part of a ground breaking circus show! Add to that a dozen more new British shows, most of which are commissions or co-commissions with the Without Walls consortium, and it’s easy to see that the Stockton is THE place to discover new trends in outdoor arts this summer.
Frank Wilson - Artistic Director