DONNA MACRAE discusses the present and future prospects for the Blas Festival

THE BLAS FESTIVAL is a Highland-wide showcase for Gaelic music and culture. The festival began as a one-day pilot event in 2004, and returned in 2005 as a nine-day feast of events, inspired by the model of the Celtic Colours event in Cape Breton.

Donna Macrae

The festival initially took place in five parts of the Highland Council area, Caithness, Sutherland, Ross-shire, Lochaber, and Skye & Lochalsh. Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey, and the Black Isle were added in 2006, and Inverness came aboard in time to celebrate the Highland Year of Culture in 2007.

The festival has placed Gaelic language as well as music at the centre of its activities, and that remains crucial. This year’s programme features a strong line-up of home-based and visiting artists, including Donnie Munro, Shooglenifty, Bruce MacGregor, Bodega, Braebach, Aly Bain & Phil Cunningham, Irish singer Noeleen Ní Cholla, Gerry O’Connor, and Cape Breton’s Buddy MacDonald, in venues ranging from Inverness Airport to Durness Village Hall.

The future development of this now well-established event is less clear in the light of the funding cuts expected from the beleaguered Highland Council, the principal backers of the event, which look like amounting to a 30% cut for next year. Northings asked Donna Macrae, the Festival Director, about these and other matters on the eve of this year’s festival (see links below for full programme).

NORTHINGS: Donna, you are listed as Festival Director alongside Brian Ó hEadhra as Artistic Director in the festival brochure, but Brian moved on earlier this year to a new job as Gaelic Arts & Culture Officer at Bòrd na Gàidhlig – how did that effect the programming?

DONNA MACRAE: Brian left at the end of March when his job changed at Bòrd, but this year’s festival was already in place, and the programming happens in the context of an action group in any case. We have a meeting every July to look at the following year, when the members of the group submit their ideas to Brian to go away and work on.

NORTHINGS: One significant looking addition this year is a big opening night event in an unlikely venue, a hanger at Inverness Airport. How did that come about?

DONNA MACRAE: We had musicians greeting arrivals in the concourse at the airport in the past, and last year we had an event in the cafeteria, and it turned into a delightful venue. This year they were keen to have more than one event, and offered the use of a hanger for a bigger concert if we felt that was a good idea – which we did. BBC Scotland will be filming it as well.

It’s an event that we think will be attractive to young people with a couple of up and coming Gaelic bands, Niteworks and Skerryvore, and Shooglenifty, who already have a wider and more established audience. So it’s a chance for us to see how it works in that kind of setting.

Shooglenifty

NORTHINGS: How do you think the general shape of the festival has changed over time – or has it?

DONNA MACRAE: At the end of each festival we have a kind of post-mortem where everyone reports back on their impressions, and we keep going back to the original remit of the event. We don’t want to try to be all things to all people. It’s more important that we hold tight to the original principles and what it is that we are doing.

There has been a steady group of people on the action group, and I think the programme has improved every year. I think there are things we tried early on that we wouldn’t repeat because we saw better ways of doing it – it’s a case of tightening up what we do and learning by experience.

NORTHINGS: Remind us just what those principles are that you are working on?

DONNA MACRAE: It’s increasingly about Gaelic and a bi-lingual approach to everything, from brochures and posters and the website to the delivery of the events. A lot of people feel that we deliver Gaelic in a very natural way at the events – they didn’t feel they were getting a dry Gaelic lesson, and I think that is very important.

We are also intent on engaging with young artists locally as well as national and international artists who have a connection with Gaelic and Highland music, and the event should also involve connections with youth, community and family groups, and should encourage an audience both from here and from beyond Scotland – and last year we had 32% of our audience coming from outside Scotland.

Donnie Munro (© donniemunro.co.uk)

NORTHINGS: That is quite a surprising proportion.

DONNA MACRAE: It is. We have an enormous amount of people coming from Germany this year, for example, which may in part be the Donnie Munro factor, but we did advertise in a major German folk magazine, and were able to provide them with editorial in German courtesy of a friend of my daughter’s, who translated all our material. I think that effort is paying off, and we also advertised in Penguin Eggs, the main Canadian folk magazine.

I built a new website for us this year because I felt there were a number of sections that we needed to be able to update ourselves. One of the things I put on there was a volunteer form, and I’ve had enquiries from people in the USA and in Hungary about coming to volunteer at the festival.

Noeleen Ní Cholla

NORTHINGS: There have been various thematic strands in past festivals, but that isn’t so apparent this time – or I am just missing them?

DONNA MACRAE: No, they are probably not there in the same way that we had in the last couple of festivals. There is an emphasis on food this year, linked to EventScotland’s food fortnight in September, and we are working with Highland food producers to have them at events and so forth, using that EventScotland funding. But otherwise we don’t really have themes this year, more individual concerts. Next year is the Year of Scottish Islands, so that may offer us something to work with.

We have a long-standing connection with Canada, and once again we are bringing over a lot of artists from there, and this year we have brought them all over for the full duration of the event, which makes more sense financially.

NORTHINGS: A Highland-wide festival is always assumed to present huge logistical difficulties, and was something that the Highland Festival was always thought to have struggled with. Blas seems to have cracked it. What’s the secret?

DONNA MACRAE: I wasn’t party to how Highland Festival operated or what their particular problems were, but they were operating in a much broader range of genres and art forms than we are, and I guess that is pertinent.

I think for me and our action group, the bottom line is that without the existing infrastructure of local promoters and our volunteer network the festival could not happen – it is all those people who are the heart of it and make it possible.

The vast majority of our events are promoted locally through the Promoters Arts Network, and I would say we have a good relationship with them. They are consulted about what sort of events they want for their area, and encouraged to make the show their own in a local sense, to the point that we have Fringe activities developing in some places, and other organisations coming to us looking to get involved.

Skerryvore

For me it’s crucial that we make sure that all the promises that we make to our partners are kept – when we say we will organise the artists or the accommodation or the meals or whatever, then we do just that. In return, they always keep their side of the bargain, which is that they promote the event locally and are there on the night to do all that needs to be done in running the show.

We do get feedback from all of the promoters, and we pay attention to that, and try to make sure that it is a partnership. The people who run the festival also know the Highlands well, and we know the people we are working with. Last year we had a get-together for promoters and crew on the beach at Arisaig rather than a formal meeting, and it felt like a very Highland day – everyone had a great time and enjoyed themselves on an informal level.

NORTHINGS: The programme looks healthy enough this year, but the event is happening in the shadow of potentially very serious funding cuts from Highland Council? How can you cope with that?

DONNA MACRAE: As I understand it we will lose 30% of our funding from Highland Council next year. We have to take that on board and look at how we might be able to deliver a festival on that basis, and how we might fill the funding gap elsewhere. I have a feeling that we may find that philanthropy kicks in in a bigger way. My view is that it is still possible to deliver a festival with a bit less money, although not with an awful lot less money, so it depends how far down the line the cuts go.

Phil Cunningham and Aly Bain

I am very optimistic that one way or another we will have the funding we require. We have a very robust set of statistics from last year – we had a snatch survey of about 1500 people, which is quite a good proportion of the audience, and from that we worked out that the Blas audience are spending around £700,000 in the region, and that excludes directly buying tickets for the festival – this is spending on accommodation and food and visiting other attractions while they are here. So Blas has a good economic impact on the region, and we are also spending money directly on services and jobs as well.

Braebach

The survey also suggested people were very satisfied with what we were doing, and it seems to me that it would be foolish for government at local or national level not to support things that are doing well. The current situation is going to force a long hard look at what we support and what we don’t support, and will require judgments about value, I think.

But from a Blas point of view, I feel optimistic, and we are well underway with putting next year’s festival together.

Blas 2010 runs from 3-12 September 2010.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2010

Links

• Blas Festival
• On-line Programme Brochure