Gaelic Festival for All

BRIAN Ó HEADHRA sets the scene for the first full-scale running of the Blas Festival
 

BLAS WAS CREATED to promote and encourage Highland music, song and dance and Gaelic arts within the Highlands. There is an emphasis on community and youth involvement, but we don’t want to be overly proscriptive. We want the local promoters and communities to be involved in the process.

There is a healthy ethos of supporting the Highlands behind the festival. There is a huge pool of talent here, and it’s getting bigger every year, and from that point of view I think it made sense to have Fèisean nan Gàidheal coordinating the project. Their success rate working with young people over the years is excellent, and I think people were happy to have them as the lead organisation to run it on that basis.

We had a conference a few years ago asking people what they thought of something like this, and even then Fèisean nan Gàidheal was seen as the way to take it forward. It is a natural progression from what they are already doing. We’ve looked at festivals like Celtic Colours in Cape Breton, the Hebridean Celtic Festival, and Celtic Connections in Glasgow, and we felt that the Highlands can sustain a festival on that level.

We are also looking at bringing in Gaels from abroad as well, and in the longer run we may well invite artists that aren’t Gaelic. We have talked about bringing in artists from Russia and other places – it wouldn’t be Gaelic culture, of course, but it could provide a fascinating contrast of two cultures, and I think that kind of thing may well happen in future years. The idea of young traditional musicians coming here from other areas and meeting up with our own young players would be great.

The focus is very much on Gaelic musicians, and we make no excuses for that – promoting the Gaels and Gaelic language is our primary purpose

I’d love to see more of that kind of interaction, even within Scotland. You still hear people in the Highlands say that Scots has nothing to do with them, or people in the Lowlands who say Gaelic has nothing to do with them, or people from Orkney and Shetland for that matter, but they are all Scots, and in the national perspective these things are all important, and it is part of their culture, maybe not their local culture, but their national culture.

The geographical area we have to cover is a big issue. We have started with five areas this year, working with local promoters there, and we have been working out the philosophy of the festival as well, looking at what we are going to have and what we aren’t going to have. The plan then is to roll it out over the next couple of years, and we have just had confirmed funding for next year at this point.

There are three levels of management – a steering group with representatives from Highland Council, Fèisean nan Gàidheal, PAN (Promoters Arts Network) and so on, then an action group making decisions about the festival, and then there is the crew of people employed to carry it out, which is basically Donna Cunningham (management) and myself (artistic coordinator), and Cailean Maclean (publicity). Arthur Cormack of Fèisean nan Gàidheal does a lot of work on it as well.

It’s not a huge organisation doing the donkey work, but it is a professional group, and we hope that will show in the festival itself. We didn’t get a full year’s run up this time – I only came in to the post in March, and we will learn a huge amount from what happens this year.
 The focus is very much on Gaelic musicians, and we make no excuses for that – promoting the Gaels and Gaelic language is our primary purpose. We will expand in future years if all goes to plan, and we’ll aim to keep it fresh as we go along.

It is a fully bi-lingual event, but with Gaelic first and English second, and I think a bi-lingual approach is the way forward for the Highlands. I work for the Gaelic language, and it may be a utopian vision, but do see a prospect of a bi-lingual Highlands. It works elsewhere, and I don’t see why it can’t work here.

The original idea for Blas came from a visit that some Councillors from Highland Council made to Celtic Colours in Cape Breton, and I’ve played there myself and know it is very impressive. We have tried to take the best ideas from all the festivals we have looked at, though, and the Highlands are different from Cape Breton – we have different issues and different geography.

Over there all of the musicians can travel back to the central location for the festival club, for example, and that isn’t feasible in that way in the Highlands. It would be nice to have a festival club in the future, because I think a festival needs that buzz of a late-night gig, but it may work fine without it. We’ll see.

This festival has been funded well from the start, whereas a lot of festivals started very small and slowly built up. We are trying to come up with our own model for the event, taking what is best from other examples, and adding our own touch. I think it’s exciting for the individual areas involved as well.

A Highland-wide festival is logistically difficult, but each of the promoters know that they can contact us and we are there for them if they are having any problems, and they also know that they can make suggestions to us. They know it isn’t just a one-way thing. We hope people will feel that we are open to ideas, even if we can’t always act on them.

We’d love to see a good mix of locals and tourists at the concerts. I hope that people will support the gigs and sell them out and be enthused by the festival

Because a number of the artists play in the Highlands a fair bit anyway, we have tried to mix and match artists with places they maybe don’t play so often, or bring people to places that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

Raasay wouldn’t necessarily have Seamus Begley as a matter of course, for example, and we can make that happen because we can subside it for them. Or take an event like the ‘An Tobar’ programme, with all of those artists onstage at one time like an old fashioned ceilidh, with a bit of crack thrown in.

The other key thing is that we have made programmes in which the local talent is given a platform in a more high quality setting then they might otherwise have had. They have good lighting, good PA and a professional presentation, and it ups the ante for them.

I’m always very aware that while all folk traditions come from the kitchen and performing with a few friends in the first instance, a lot of young musicians now only really grow up with a big stage performance tradition.

That is a relatively new thing in traditional music, being up there with lighting and microphones and needing your stagecraft and so on. We can help to prepare them for that, and give them a platform in an attractive concert that people are prepared to pay for. We want to put on concerts in local communities that are as professionally presented as they would be at Eden Court Theatre.

It’s a good deal for local promoters. They get artists provided for them, transport provided, fees paid, and they still get their percentage at the door, so we are hoping they will be doing a hard sell in their local communities. Highland audiences tend to work on a walk-up basis on the night, but ideally in future we would like to see the concerts selling out before they actually happen.

I am very hopeful that we can create a real buzz around Blas, and people will start to come here for the festival. There is a huge market in Ireland and other Celtic countries for this kind of music, and if we are able to offer people nine days of music and the chance to travel around the most beautiful countryside in Britain and go to gigs every night if they wish, that seems very attractive to me, and we need to get tour operators and the like thinking along those lines. It’s not as easy to get here as Edinburgh or Glasgow, so we have to work a little bit harder at it – but look what we have to offer.

We’d love to see a good mix of locals and tourists at the concerts. I hope that people will support the gigs and sell them out and be enthused by the festival, and that everyone enjoys themselves. We aim to provide them with high-quality entertainment, and so far the reaction has been very positive. It is hard to gauge ticket sales accurately at this point, and there probably will be a big walk-up audience, but we are optimistic at this point, and really looking forward to the launch.

Brian Ó hEadhra is the Artistic Coordinator of Blas.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2005