A festival is like a wild animal, like a hungry beast. There is never enough. You must keep feeding it. Even with a minimal budget and a small team, but the beast couldn’t give a damn about this. Above all, a festival wants to evolve.
As the artistic director, you must learn to love the beast and take care of it. Sometimes you must reason with it and tell it that it’s exaggerating. You let it know that it can’t have everything it wants, not this year in any case. But you always add something new to its diet: artists it doesn’t know, undisciplined disciplines it must learn how to tame, new ways of going about things, and new success evaluation criteria.
If cared for properly, your hungry beast will be transformed into a superb purebred animal; a whimsical, untamable, impertinent, charming, funny and misbehaved creature. This doesn’t however mean that the beast is no longer hungry, that it no longer clamors for your attention and keeps asking for more. Let’s say that the beast has found something to do that allows it to channel its drives into something creative.
Quite a challenge! Like love. It brings out the courage, creativity and daringness in you. But all this must be channeled into a project, otherwise the passion wanes and the suppressed energy eats you up from the inside.
In any case for me, D. Kimm, this is how I approach the Phénomena Festival. Like a purebred and unpredictable beast that needs to run wild, be surprised, raise questions. And I dare to claim that I have the experience and the vision to boldly continue developing this place which is unlike any other. Because Phénomena provides a real platform for interdisciplinary and unclassifiable artists who want to shake things up and transgress norms, all the while asserting beauty and poetry.
I believe that my strongest gift is my capacity to surround myself with the right people. I work with a team of gifted and generous collaborators, people who put their heart and soul into their work. I also feel fortunate to have the opportunity to meet and discover exceptional, independent, and original artists, who pull out all the stops to give shape to their visions and share them with an initiated or uninitiated audience. Phénomena is all about creation, no doubt, but it is also about commitment and generosity.
Welcome to our world!