This year's far eastern programme harks back to cultural events from the past, encouraging audiences to question the very idea of exoticism and otherness
Since he took over in 2007, artistic director Jonathan Mills has put his stamp on the Edinburgh international festival by programming thematically. Rather than just presenting a load of good opera, dance, theatre and music, he has tried to order the work around a governing principle. In his inaugural year, for example, he explored the meeting place between theatre and music; in 2009, he considered the impact of the Scottish enlightenment; and, in 2010, he looked to the Pacific cultures of the "new world". He does not apply the theme to every last show but, to varying degrees, he lets it seep into most of the work.
For his 2011 programme, announced today, he has taken his biggest step yet away from the EIF's Eurocentric roots. His starting point is the stop-off destinations on the long-haul flights to his native Australia, the place we in Britain call the "far east" ? although, as he likes to point out, in these changing political times, perhaps those of us on this side of the planet should think of ourselves as being in the "far west". So the programme includes Chinese classical ballet, ragas by Ravi Shankar, music from the western deserts of Rajasthan and productions of The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan, in which Hamlet is reborn as Beijing opera, The Tempest, in which Prospero's magic finds a home in Korean folklore, and One Thousand and One Nights, in which director Tim Supple works with performers from across the Arab world.
It promises a markedly different flavour of performance from what we are used to in the UK. Stressing the qualities of sensuousness, grace and beauty, Mills harks back to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 when, for the first time, Debussy listened to Japanese and Indonesian musical instruments and marvelled at the woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. Mills, he says, would like his programme to be equally revelatory.
Where, though, does genuine artistic enquiry become exploitative cultural tourism? What is the difference between a festival that is about exoticism and one that is guilty of exoticism? "The degree of naivety," answered Mills, when I put the question to him. "There are certain things that are about the notion of the exotic that Europeans need to deal with and we are juxtaposing that with the reality of Asia. We're making a covert comment to encourage people to think about contemporary reality versus the time of an idealised, fetishised notion of [the far east]."
By presenting work within the festival context, he is able to frame it in a particular way. We might, for example, understand Haydn's Orlando Paladino, with its exotic cast of mythic characters, or Massenet's Tha�s, with its vision of a far-away Egypt, in a different way when we see them alongside, say, the authentic Korean choreography of Eun-Me Ahn Company in Princess Bari.
There is also a considerable amount of two-way traffic in the August line-up, whether it is a Taiwanese actor single-handedly taking on that bastion of British culture, King Lear, or New York multimedia artists Stephen Earnhart and Greg Pierce adapting The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Japan's Haruki Murakami. Such cultural collisions should make it more apparent that this is not just a decadent display of treasures picked up on the artistic director's travels, but a festival that encourages us to question the very idea of exoticism and otherness even as we revel in its unfamiliarity.
Jordana Brewster Laetitia Casta Claudette Ortiz Julia Stiles Marisa Miller
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