First EIF award heads across the pond

Published Tuesday 4 September 2007 at 12:00 by Thom Dibdin

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John Clancy, the New York-based producer and director, has won the first Edinburgh International Festival award for his production of Fatboy at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

The award was introduced by new EIF director Jonathan Mills and is worth £5,000. It enables the winner to develop a new project which will be invited to next year’s festival as part of the new Behind The Scenes programme.

Mills told The Stage: “We were looking for somebody whose work would benefit by being given a workshop and be able to sustain a full evening’s worth in a theatre, where there was some quality of integrity and where there was some quality of the inventiveness of the language.”

The award was made on the recommendation of a panel of judges chaired by Faith Liddell, director of Festivals Edinburgh. She said the decision to make the award to Clancy was unanimous. Fatboy is a scabrous Punch and Judy-style send-up of corpulent American consumerism which first appeared at the fringe in 2004.

“We were looking at how you make a performance, trying to get inside the nitty gritty,” said Mills. “It’s like saying, ‘Does this guy have the bag of tricks, the repertoire of movements and the sonic imagination to do something really interesting for us?’.”

“We’re going to build this award up gently and slowly. We would love these sorts of shows to have a life beyond Edinburgh and the degree to which one can do that is the degree to which those artists are practical.”

Mills said while he anticipated the new project would have a life beyond next year’s EIF, he was initially only committing to its appearance in Behind The Scenes. This is equally a commitment to the new strand of the EIF, showing audience the level of work it takes to go from a blank page to an opening night.

In separate developments, Mills confirmed his decision not to use Scottish Opera in this year’s EIF was a financial one - he approached them with a project but discovered he could get the same project from a continental producer for £200,000 less.

Mills also confirmed that the Edinburgh Tattoo is planning to renew the 35 year-old Esplanade seating in 2010 and it is in talks with EIF about how the different festivals might share its use.

“Major General Loudon is talking about a renewal of that seating if he gets the money for 2010,” said Mills.

“I’m really focused on 2008 and 2009 before that. I’ve got many other things at the front of my mind, so that is tucked away at the back for a potential opportunity in the future when we know what the specific timetable is.”