From down under to north of the border

Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills tells Nick Awde about his background in Australia, his ideas for the event and plans to link up with the fringe.

Despite heading one of the world’s top arts festivals, Jonathan Mills is refreshingly frank about joining such a select profession. “I’ve enjoyed enormously every festival I’ve worked on, but I haven’t always actively sought them out.”

His appointment in October last year as director of the Edinburgh International Festival was seen by some as a shock choice. It is an understandable reaction given that previous incumbent Brian McMaster had spent so many years at the helm, that his stepping down sparked a flurry of speculation over his successor, and all sorts of unlikely international heavyweight names were bandied about by the media.

In fact, Sydney-born Mills has a wealth of experience that mainlines directly to Edinburgh. “Because Australia is so isolated geographically, our festival cultures have developed as an major way for us to convey cultural diversity and international projects. And, of course, there’s a very strong Scottish diaspora in Australia - my own grandfather included - so we knew how lucky Edinburgh was to have its festivals. Looking from the sidelines, we said, ‘We want one of those!’ - and to a huge degree, Australia’s festivals have since derived from the success of the Edinburgh festivals.”

Mills credentials are intriguing, to say the least. Aside from having been director of the Brisbane, Blue Mountains and Melbourne festivals, he studied music and composition and is an award-winning composer, while he is also a specialist in architectural acoustics.

His job before taking up his five-year appointment in Scotland was vice-chancellor’s fellow at Melbourne University, advising on how to present the institution’s rich resources to a broader audience. “It was like giving me a proper wage to think and be me for a couple of years. The post goes to somebody who’s particularly interested in the ideal of the public intellectual, which I certainly am.”

Clearly Mills is comfortable with the ‘big idea’, something that he has now been busy introducing to Edinburgh in his own way. “I believe the EIF is about ideas and that artists are great because of the way they think. Shakespeare, for example, was a poet whose work you can’t peel down to being about one thing - it’s about a thousand things at once. Artists are ultimately people who deal with ideas.”

Unsurprisingly, this year’s festival is built around a single idea, one that the composer Monteverdi had in the early 17th century, namely combining music, words, drama and stagecraft all at once - this evolved into the universal form of European opera. This theme resonates throughout the 2007 programme in a deliberate homage to the international festival of 1983, which the then director John Drummond had themed around Vienna during the year 1900.

Mills wants his own theme to be seen as unique to Edinburgh, and he has continued the McMaster legacy of commissioning as much new work as possible. “There are more original commissions than I thought there would be, although I wasn’t trying to add up a quota for it. We’ve got new work from Scottish Ballet, the National Theatre of Scotland and David Greig, and the Tiger Lillies. We’re part of the World Premiere Season of shows like La Didone by the Wooster Group. We’ve been able to commission or initiate more than I had thought we would, just by being careful and judicious, by being quick and careful.”

It will be interesting to observe how such thinking on a grand scale interacts with the concepts introduced by the other new directors that have been appointed across the various festivals recently. His Festival Fringe counterpart Jon Morgan only started in June, but Mills has already started work on the relationship between their two festivals, historically considered to be rivals.

“This whole idea that we fight and bicker is not true. The festivals groups get together and get drunk together often. But we do need to continue to build on our relationship, especially with the fringe. This year, for example, we’ve announced a prize of £5,000 for the next three years - as a trial - that will go to a project we find in the fringe. This will be for a workshop that will hopefully lead to work in the following year’s International Festival.”

Mills is also committed to his audience. “People come to Edinburgh because of the extraordinary range of work that happens here. The International Festival alone would be pretty good for any city, but together, the Edinburgh festivals are overwhelming. This is the biggest smorgasbord of the arts in the world. And these aren’t just words. I’m being paid by the taxpayers in Scotland, I want to do a fantastic job for one and all. And that’s a matter of principle.”