Notes from a festival that refused to grow.
One field, three nights, eighty-six attendees — by design. We attended a small, deliberately small, festival in rural Kent and asked the organisers why they had said no to every offer to expand.
The field sits at the edge of a working farm about an hour and a half south-east of London by train and bus. The festival is six years old. It has eighty-six attendees this year, a number that has not changed in five of the six years it has existed. The organisers — a collective of four people, three of them former performers — have turned down, at last count, seven separate offers of expansion, three from arts councils, two from production companies, and two from the kind of consortium that promotes itself as "scaling unique cultural experiences."
The festival's premise is small in every direction. Three nights, four acts a night, in a single open-sided structure built each year from scaffolding and tarp. There is a small kitchen serving one meal per day, a single composting toilet, and an arrangement with the nearest pub for showers. Tickets cost a hundred and forty pounds for the weekend, which covers everything.
Why the cap
The organisers are careful about how they explain it. They are not, they insist, against larger festivals. They are not pretending that small is morally superior to large. They are not interested in being the boutique alternative, the curated counter-example, the "real" thing in opposition to a fake one. They are not interested, particularly, in being talked about at all.
What they are interested in, they told me — sitting in the kitchen tent on the Saturday afternoon, between sets — is the simple proposition that this particular festival, with this particular kind of programming, will not work above a certain size. The intimacy of the work breaks. The attention shifts. The room becomes a crowd, and the work was not made for a crowd.
"We are not against larger festivals. We are saying that this work, in this room, breaks above a certain size. That is all."
What the programming looks like
The acts I saw — over two nights, having missed the Friday — were almost without exception small in form. A monologue performed by an actor who walked among the seated audience without amplification. A duet for cello and breath. A long solo dance accompanied only by a clock. A spoken-word piece performed in near-darkness with a single candle.
The audience watched closely, and quietly. Between acts there were ten-minute pauses, during which most of the room simply sat, talking in small groups, with no music to fill the silence. The pauses are part of the programming, the organisers told me. They are the reason the bill never has more than four acts a night.
The economics
The festival makes, on a good year, a small surplus. The four organisers take a modest fee — equivalent, between them, to perhaps a month's salary at minimum wage. The performers are paid in the low hundreds for their set, plus accommodation in nearby B&Bs and meals on site. The remaining costs — the scaffolding, the licences, the insurance, the toilet hire — are met by ticket revenue and a small, settled grant from a regional foundation.
It is, by the standards of festival economics, marginal. It is not, the organisers insist, fragile. The festival's financial discipline is its smallness. They are not chasing growth, so they do not need to. They are not promising the foundation a year-on-year increase in attendees, so they do not need to inflate. They are not in a contractual relationship with a venue that demands a minimum spend, so they do not need to fill seats they cannot fill thoughtfully.
What they say no to
The list is long. They have said no to: a sponsorship offer from a regional drinks brand, on the grounds that they did not want the brand's signage in the field. They have said no to a documentary crew. They have said no to a partnership with a larger festival that would have moved the event to a venue in London with five times the capacity. They have said no, more than once, to the suggestion that they "open up the daytime" with workshops or fringe activities.
The reason for each "no" is, they say, the same. Each addition would change what the festival is. Some of the changes might be improvements. None of them would leave the thing they came to make.
What happens next
The festival is not, the organisers told me, intended to last forever. They have given themselves a notional ten-year horizon, after which they intend to take stock. Three of the four of them have said, privately, that they expect the festival to end at the ten-year mark. The fourth is, by her own account, less sure.
What they will not do, they all agree, is allow the festival to outlast the conditions under which it works. The eighty-six-person field, the four-act bill, the one-meal kitchen, the silence between sets — these are not features. They are the festival. Without them, the project would be something else, and they are not interested in making something else.
I left on the Sunday morning with two opinions I had not entered with. The first was that small festivals, properly conceived, are not a romantic compromise — they are a different artistic form, with their own technical demands. The second was that the discipline of saying no to growth is, almost always, harder than the discipline of saying yes.