A Showcase for the Highlands and Islands

FIONA HAMPTON, the director of Highland 2007, spoke to Northings on the eve of the launch of what should be a momentous year for arts and culture in the Highlands and Islands

NORTHINGS: Fiona, you will know better than anyone that pretty much since the initial annoucement by the First Minister a couple of years ago in the wake of the unsuccessful InvernessHighland bid to be European Centre of Culture in 2008, there has been no shortage of debate and disagreement over the direction that H2007 should take, whether in terms of overall strategy or individual events.

FIONA HAMPTON: That’s true, but what I would say now is that whatever frustrations people might have felt – or feel – about the project, we have a real chance to showcase the area, and I would say to people please use it. We won’t get this kind of spotlight on the region again, and we all must make the most of it. I feel people are definitely getting behind it, and that includes people who have disagreed with us about aspects of it, but are now focusing on what is best for the area as a whole, and are putting their support behind it. This is a once-only opportunity.

N: There is lots of information on the Highland 2007 website, so I’m not going to ask you to wade through the detail of what it is all about, but how would you summarise the event for anyone who hasn’t been following the story so far?

As much as possible now we want the whole of the Highlands and Islands to take ownership of this festival, and to run with it

FH: Our main priority in H2007 is to showcase what is unique and special about this area, and what we are trying to do with everything that comes our way is to select what is unique and special, and to try to put that on stage, because that is what is going to differentiate us from all the other festivals for people coming to the area.

It is a one-off opportunity to showcase the best of Highland culture, past, present and future. We have been supported by three main member organisations, Highland Council, Scottish Executive and HIE, backed up by other local authorities in the area, and over 50 national partners across the whole range of the festival.

Our job has been to try to collate a whole programme of events and projects and happenings that will create that showcase. In its basic form you will find a listing of events on the website, but what we are trying to do is to build a whole series of marketing initiatives and profile-raising activities around those events throughout the year.

We want to reach not just the Highlands and Islands, but people across Scotland, the UK and internationally to get that message across. We have to pull together the content, and work with all these agencies to make it happen, and put the Highlands and Islands on everyone’s radar.

N: Although it begins on 1 January, you have chosen to hold off the official launch until the Auld New Year on 12 January, when there will be a Monster Street Party in Inverness. What are the plans for that event?

FH: There is a programme built around that weekend. The Monster Street Party will begin with the official launch of H2007, and the First Minister, Jack McConnell, will be there to do that.

We chose the Monster theme because the Highlands has the most famous monster in the world, and we felt it would be a fitting theme. We have scoured Europe to source colleagues of Nessie and brought them together for the night. People will gather on Ness Bank and Ness Bridge for the first section, with the Gaelic Choir and a Pipe Band, but presented in a way that you won’t have seen before.

Then the Monsters will come to the party and lead people back into the city, and you can move around over there looking at different aspects of it all. Transe Express from Marseilles will perform their spectacular aerial show at Falcon Square at 9pm.

There will be Fireworks and lots of things going on, and the city itself will be the focus of all this. Again, we’re looking for it to be a unique showcase for the city, rather than trying to do what others already do. I don’t think Inverness has ever had a party on this scale before. We are hoping that the various venues in the city will then be open and put on something of their own once the street party winds down around 10pm.

There will be some stuff happening on Saturday as well, including the opening of the re-furbished Inverness Museum and Gallery with the Fonn ‘s Duthchas (Land and Legacy) exhibition, and an Old New Year Shinty Match at the Bught Park. The exhibition has been pulled together from the collections of the National Museums, the National Galleries and the National Library. It will premiere in Inverness, then go to Glasgow and Edinburgh later in the year before returning to Stornoway, and smaller units of it will then be created for legacy.

N: The party is being staged by Unique Events, who do the big Hogmanay celebrations in Edinburgh, among many other things. Why did you choose them?

FH: It went through a tendering process, and they emerged as the company best placed to handle something of this scale. They have huge experience, and they have a very capable team in place.

N: We should maybe follow that by explaining H2007’s role in putting these events on – you don’t actually directly promote or stage events, do you?

FH: We tend to describe it as brokering. We have been able to bring in funding from many sources, in addition to the core funding we received from the three member organisations. We have liaised with national agencies and the commercial sector, and we then take that funding and distribute it according to the reasons that we have been given it, through a variety of programmes that include international funding, regional funding, community funding, capital projects and various other things.

The funds were distributed in accordance with the purpose of the funders. Events Scotland, for example, wanted to fund events which will attract visitors or media to the area, and they have provided the majority of the major event funding.

We are looking at around a £14 million pound budget in cash and kind, and we have brokered the money in and back out. Our next main job is to keep people on board and get the word out on H2007 as widely as possible, both locally and around the world. There has been a huge amount of work done behind the scenes that isn’t going to be obvious to the public, but now you will see a lot more public activity and information going out.

Sometimes that will be general information to the public, and in other cases it will be working with specific media partners to reach target audiences. Our first official printed programme will cover January to April, although I’m sure there will be more events added even in that period, but our media work goes way beyond just the printed or website material.

N: We have seen the announcement of events like the Street Party and Runrig at Loch Ness, but are there more big arts events likely to be added?

FH: I don’t think they have all been revealed as yet, no, and in some cases I’m not sure that the significance of some of them has been fully taken on board yet. There are also some hidden gems in there as well, and I’m pretty sure there will be more to come around the various regions.

We still have to announce the artists that will be coming to Inverness Fest in July, for example, and the line-up for Rock Ness hasn’t been announced, so there is still a lot to come even in terms of the big headline events that are already in the programme.

We remain hopeful that BAFTA Scotland Awards might come to the Inverness Film Festival in September, and we hope it might still be possible to persuade some other events that would normally happen in the central belt to come here in 2007, just as the Scots Trad Music Awards have done for both 2006 and 2007. And we still haven’t decided what we are going to do on 31 December, 2007, but we don’t plan to just let it fade away!

N: What kind of percentage of the funding applications have you been able to satisfy?

FH: It’s hard to quantify, partly because we devolved a lot of the decision-making out to the local areas. We certainly had much more demand than supply, and there have been no shortage of applications, which meant having to make robust decisions when it came to distributing funding.

I’m happy with the quality of that decision-making. There is a massive difference between this project and a more conventional festival. We have had to bring a budget together from many sources and satisfy a huge range of stakeholders, and try to create a balance across a huge programme with a lot of the finance ring-fenced for very specific uses. We would still like to try to draw in some more money that we can apply to specific projects as the year goes on.

I’m not sure anyone will try to do this kind of thing again in its complexity. It’s been about trying to combine the old and the new, the existing and the incoming, trying to balance aspirations and answer queries. The scope is immense, and it’s very difficult to communicate exactly what is happening across the whole range of the festival.

N: What kind of legacy are you hoping H2007 will leave in its wake?

FH: We want to raise the positive profile of the area, and that is a legacy in itself, and we have started working with partners to create a cultural policy and events strategy post-2007. Bill Sylvester, who led the original team for the InvernessHighland bid to be European Centre of Culture in 2008, always tells me that if 2008 is better than 2006, then 2007 has left a good legacy.

We shouldn’t be comparing subsequent years with 2007, which is going to be unique, but looking at what the improvements on the pre-2007 situation are.

We will also have a massive bricks and mortar legacy as well, with funding help going to projects like Eden Court, the Visitor Centre at Culloden, Sabhal Mor Ostaig and others.

I know there are people out there who are saying they don’t know enough about it yet, but that will change, and the thing that we have really noticed is how much people have gotten involved in the whole project when they do come in, and how committed they are to it. It has already gone well beyond the H2007 team, and as much as possible now we want the whole of the Highlands and Islands to take ownership of this festival, and to run with it. When you get that enthusiasm going, you have to make the most of it.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2006