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FormalPara Brandon Farnsworth:

Could you start by telling us a bit about the background of the festival?

FormalPara Peter Meanwell:

Borealis—a festival for experimental music is a 5-day festival that takes place every March in Bergen, Norway. We exist to present artists pushing at the edges of their genres. It is not just about conservatory-trained, scored music, not about free improv, or sound art or noise music, it is about people who are exploring sound, music, time, and listening in all its forms. We programme artists that are exciting, dynamic, and boundary pushing both from Norway and internationally, while also working out how the festival can have a positive effect on the society in which we live.

FormalPara Tine Rude:

We started at the festival at almost the same time as a dual-leader team. When we started, Peter and I were both in part-time positions, and now we have created a much more robust organisational structure with a year-round organisational staff and more secure financing. We wanted it to be a platform where new perspectives and ideas get to the community throughout the year, building an audience and a better understanding of the perspectives we present. For example, we launched a mentor programme for young composers, a yearly programme where we develop new voices to be heard in the future. We also have a monthly listening club where we are breaking down the barriers to entry into the music, art, and ideas that we present. More recently, we launched an artist-in-residence programme that has had an enormous impact on how we look at our own organisation, and how we plan to achieve our vision.

FormalPara PM:

We have a dual leadership model at the festival because these decisions are not separate. As artistic director, I have responsibility for the programme, and as managing director, Tine Rude is responsible for the budget and staff, but naturally one impacts the other. We continually discuss how we can evolve and effectively realise our aim of presenting excellent, surprising, brilliant new work in a way that impacts the world.

We do not believe that art exists in a vacuum, so we have also become very intentional about how our curatorial and organisational decisions impact accessibility, resources, and sustainability issues. This has led us to think a lot about implementing gender equality in programming, but also staffing, how we use our money, the festival’s environmental impact, our impact on the local Bergen music scene, who we give a platform to, who do we support through employment, how our commissioning money gets spent, etc.

FormalPara BF:

You mentioned the impact your artist-in-residence programme has had. What has that impact been?

FormalPara PM:

For the artist-in-residence programme, we wanted to invite people who had experimental sound practices that were intertwined with a deep involvement in social justice work. We wanted to find out what happens when we bring this kind of artist into our organisation and give them space to create, as well as work with us as an organisation, giving us feedback and challenging or critiquing us.

Our first artist in residence was Jenny Moore. She runs F*Choir, an all-genders community choir in London that is very active in terms of gender equity and developing a music pedagogy that dismantles gender hierarchy and gender violence. She is very good at asking quite pointed questions to us about how you do this [laughs]. For Borealis—a festival for experimental music, she initiated a project called Doing Not Saying, as we were in a post-2016 moment (post-Brexit, post-Trump) where there was a lot of performative allyship going on, but she wanted to focus on what we are actually doing and changing. She also created a feminist militia that was present at the festival as a support network patrolling our concerts for people who did not feel comfortable. It was both a real thing and an art project. Out of that came various other ongoing initiatives, like providing small business cards with crisis lines, reporting procedures within the festival in case of abuse, and what we put into our contracts about our values.

Our current artist in residence is the improvising drummer and music research strategist Marshall Trammell, who is looking at notions of solidarity and the specificity of the black experience in Bergen, which is quite distinct from the black experience in the UK or the US. Our next artist in residence is Elina Waage Mikalsen, who is a Sámi sound artist and visual artist we will be working with. This is part of us taking a look at specifically Norwegian colonial history, a topic that has long been overlooked.

FormalPara TR:

With Jenny Moore, we wanted to have someone who could ask these challenging and difficult questions, and also to be honest with us when we were saying something but not doing it. This was challenging, and started off with Peter and I directly, then later on we added to this to include the team, then other groups in our festival team, and then to get it into the DNA of the organisation.

FormalPara PM:

Out of that project came a lot of practical things. Together with Jenny Moore, we started giving our festival volunteers training on how to create safer spaces and how to diffuse aggression. We also worked on small things like if someone asks you where the toilet is, not to assume their gender, but just to inform where they are. We also now insist on gender neutral toilets in all our venues. We got a lot of feedback from gender-non-conforming people who said they finally felt seen when they went to a concert, and now they will come back to this festival.

We dug into the question of who was not present and why. For example, if all parties are in bars, does that exclude a non-drinking audience? We created chill-out rooms where possible in all of our venues, quieter spaces where you could take time out. We thought about door policy in classical music concerts. If someone has anxiety issues, then getting locked in and not able to leave is a barrier to them, they should be able to leave and come back in again. We figured out how we could achieve this without distracting from the music, making seats available for this purpose. We thought about the many small barriers that stand in the way of engaging with music, considering programme duration, what information is given, how the festival’s economic power is being used, where we find our music, where are the concert venues we would not normally go to, etc. It became an ingrained part of everybody’s thinking, embedding the diversity values of the organisation into the future strategy for the festival.

To mention one last thing we are working on, a lot of projects that travel to Bergen are presented in English by US or UK artists. We have been thinking a lot about how to translate these ideas into Norwegian, as this is more impactful for the local audience, but often find there are no words to properly translate. For example, if we try to unpack the concept of BIPOC (ed: Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) in Norwegian, you run into a world of words and definitions that do not exist or do not translate. It is not just about transplanting a global sense of injustice onto Bergen, although there is a lot of global injustice that is relevant here too, but it is also about finding the words that make it relevant to the community.

FormalPara TR:

We also started expanding the ‘us’, instead of talking about including someone else for them to feel welcome. One of the lessons that was very crucial was that we spend a lot of time on this. The outcomes are almost mundane, like putting up gender neutral toilet signs, but it does not feel like a list that you can hand over to every organisation, we needed to go through the process ourselves and understand why it was crucial for us to be doing this ourselves.

FormalPara BF:

Do you see these reforms at your own institution as a critique of the larger institution of music itself?

FormalPara PM:

Why would we not do this? Why would we exclude part of the population from being involved? Why would we operate with a policy from the 1850s? We are recipients of public money, why would we not spend it in a way that benefits all of society and includes more people? Of course there is an implicit critique, because a lot of other people do not do it. We feel very strongly that we serve a community and an audience, and that community should not be limited to one idea of what the eligible people are in that space. It is something that we have also inherited, this festival is not immune to the colonial history of classical music that it emerged from, which is something we are working to change. If you are not actively doing something, then you are supporting the status quo, which is patriarchal, racist, misogynist, and colonial.

FormalPara TR:

But important to add, we also do it wrong, this is part of the conversation and the process. We have to try to do something and make changes. We also share our knowledge, it is not just for Borealis – a festival for experimental music, it is for Bergen, for the community. We are now part of a bigger project that Bergen Kommune (City of Bergen) has initiated to make the general music scene in Bergen into a safer space, building on both our knowledge and other organisations in Bergen that are trying and testing different methods. We are sharing with those who also seek to change, we also dare to stand up for what we believe in, take on difficult conversations, and to face those who believe differently. These are all important parts of what we do, although they are not always comfortable.

FormalPara PM:

Out of the Doing Not Saying programme also came our 3-year Borealis Radius project focussing on changing institutional knowledge and about grassroots engagement. It was also about creating a long-term programme that worked on building relationships to communities that have been marginalised by the art scene and then develop in a way that means we have a long-lasting relationship and can build institutional change to incorporate new voices into our community in order to become a diverse group of people that create the festival.

FormalPara BF:

Do you see an opposition between working with communities in Bergen and giving platforms for individuals to push boundaries?

FormalPara PM:

I am not sure I see a contradiction. The values of the music we present are exploratory, and that is about trying to do something that you are not comfortable with. The other value of the festival is to create a safe frame for people to come in and explore without feeling alienated or pushed out. It is about creating trust then bringing new experiences.

The notion of listening is also key. If we take it in the Oliveros sense of listening as a radical act of hearing other perspectives, it is not a large step from experimental music to marginalised people. Often musicians will say, e.g. they are working with synthesisers because the orchestra would not perform their work, or they are making sounds because they did not find them anywhere else. There is a connection between experimental music creation and people who are marginalised in the community and who have not been listened to.

FormalPara BF:

Is the festival responding to artists’ changing practices, or is the festival itself changing practices through commissioning in new formats?

FormalPara TR:

Commissioning always starts with the artist, but we can make new ideas come alive in a bigger context. It is not about changing practices, but about making sure that we as an organisation can fit different projects. We always start with the biggest idea possible, and then we see how we can make that happen. Sometimes it can take us years to find the right people to collaborate with to facilitate a project.

FormalPara PM:

We are choosing people because we support their values in the artistic projects that they do. There is also a reciprocal effect though, in that being given the platform of an organisation allows people to explore their own praxis. For example with Jenny Moore’s artist residency, we gave a bigger platform that opened up a new space for everyone.

FormalPara BF:

From afar, much of how you approach your festival reminds me of New Institutionalism, focussing on adapting formats to what artists currently need, long-term collaborations as in your artist-in-residence programme, engaging directly with artists’ critiques as in the Doing Not Saying project, and engaging with local histories and communities as well as a more expanded international community of artists ‘pushing boundaries’.

FormalPara PM:

Talking about Jonas Ekeberg and New Institutionalism, it ties into the Doing Not Saying project like you mention, but also into Tim Ingold’s idea of thinking through making, where the act of making things is itself a thought process. We did not set out to copy New Institutionalism, all we set out to do was to create a festival that was ethically right. We make Borealis – a festival for experimental music in response to the world that we live in. What the festival does now is urgent because it is how we think our institution should exist within society, doing this by creating platforms to show work from myriad different backgrounds, ideas, and viewpoints, and constructing the new ‘we’ of the music institution.