The National Arts Festival, which starts in Grahamstown next weekend, enters a brave new era in its bid for economic survival.
This year the festival will be without the title sponsorship of Standard Bank for the first time in the past 18 years of its 28-year history.
Mandy van der Spuy, art sponsorship manager for Standard Bank, says that the bank has withdrawn to search for other arts sponsorship opportunities. “We feel Grahamstown is important, but it happens in a specific part of the country for a specific period. We thus decided to search for other opportunities.” The bank still sponsors the festival’s Young Artist Award and the jazz component.
Bankrolling this year’s fest is the National Arts Council — a funding body, the Eastern Cape government and the Shamwari Game Reserve. Themba Wakashe, Deputy Director General in the Department of Arts Culture, Science and Technology, says the department has met the directors of all the major festivals to comprehensively review them, assess their economic impact and help to make them sustainable.
Arts festivals introduce economies of scale for artistic productions and synergies across metiers. They lower the cost of enjoying a concentrated number of shows in a specific period and allow arts fanciers to enjoy work in disciplines they would normally not see.
As an audience drawcard, the Grahamstown event has undergone interesting times recently.
Professor Geoff Antrobus of the economics department at Rhodes University, the heart of the festival, has done studies to assess the festival’s monetary benefit to the town. Last year the festival pumped between R30-million and R35-million into the local economy, spent on a range of goods and services from accommodation to meals, shows and souvenirs.
The festival has gone through phases of revenue decline, such as in 1997 when income stood at R20-million, down from the previous year’s R25-million.
A more interesting range of observations comes from assessing the festival’s social benefits and economic viability. Jen Snowball, a lecturer at Rhodes who co-authored the research with Antrobus, notes: “Contrary to popular belief, Grahamstown people with lower income and education levels, that is, those people who cannot afford shows, still have positive feelings about the festival. In some cases even more positive than those [residents] in higher income groups.”
Snowball also points to benefits provided by the festival that are not reflected in the ticket prices, including temporary job opportunities and a positive image of the town. The authors put these intangible benefits, which largely accrue to the lower income earners, at between R2,3-million and R3-million.
The festival also exhibits interesting attendance patterns. The largest constituency of “festinos” is the 18- to 25-year-old category, which accounts for 32% of audiences. This is probably due to the festival’s growing youth culture component, which has attracted sponsorship from energy drink brands and clothing labels by showcasing stand-up comedy and club culture. Last year foreigners accounted for 9% of audiences, with most coming from the United Kingdom and Germany.
Audiences have also shown a growing tendency to spend time at shows, both paying and free, rather than just shopping, going to street parties and “basking in the experience”.
Arts festivals also tend to have industry-wide benefits. Because of its financial muscle, the National Arts Festival can commission new work. This year one of many such examples is Paul Slabolepszy’s Mooi Street Moves, a stage piece directed by Mncedisi Shabangu.
Big-budget, crowd-pulling works on the main stage are funded by the festival. However, productions on the fringe, which are usually more experi-mental, have to raise their own funding with the hope of making a profit at the festival.
Gita Pather, Market Theatre CEO, confirms the broader spin-offs. To acquire a work like Mooi Street Blues, it will now cost the Market up to 50% less, owing to savings on pre-production costs.
Pather, who has organised festivals like the South African Women’s Arts Festival in Durban and the Cultural Calabash in the North West, notes disparities in sponsoring patterns. She laments that Calabash, which is spread throughout the rural North West, is still struggling to assert itself on the cultural scene, while in nearby Potchefstroom, the annual Afrikaans arts festival Aardklop sprang up as a one-off event that has sponsors like the satellite channel kykNET and SABC2.
“We still have to look at the buying power of audiences and who makes the decisions about sponsorship investments,” she says. This becomes imperative when one considers that festivals — and arts in general — can never be self-sustaining.
Snowball confirms this: “Because of the market failure in the case of cultural goods, it is unlikely that the festival will ever be able to support itself on the income it generates.” She adds that this trend is evident at festivals in countries like Australia and Scotland.
The biggest criticism Grahamstown has faced has been a failure to distribute income generated by the festival across its population.
Critics frequently point to images of rich whites rushing to shows and restaurants, while hawkers from the nearby black town of Rhini man stalls of low-cost consumer goods or beg.
Snowball has found that income accrues to the higher income earners like business owners, restaurateurs and owners of bed-and-breakfast establishments. Despite this, the research shows that they retain only 5,4% of what they make from the festival, while low-income earners retain 82,7% — suggesting the heavy dependence of poor Grahamstowners on the annual festival.