Artistic Director's Welcome to Merge2012: Our City, Our Story

Hello, and welcome to the third Merge Arts Festival - Merge2012: Our City, Our Story. Thanks for coming along.

This year's Festival has been inspired by the archives held at Hull History Centre. There's a wealth of information from Hull's rich past in there and it's well worth a visit.

We hope Merge2012 brings together yet more people in a celebration of the city's talent and heritage. You'll see the archives reflected in our centrepiece event, Merge @ Hull City Hall, our evening concert featuring a selection of local (Hull, the East Riding and Lincolnshire) folk songs housed in the archives. There's also Winifred: A Dramatic Portrait, which dramatises the life of local author Winifred Holtby. Other events in our program also go some way to celebrating local talent and local heritage.

This is our biggest festival yet, and once again I am grateful to a wide range of people for their support. Many of them are named in this brochure, but a few deserve a special mention. The University of Hull's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences has again been generous in their support, and we recognise generous support from the City Council in various guises. We'd also like to thank our venues, the City Hall, Hartley's Tap and NAPA, for their support and generous hosting. Other people worthy of special mention are listed along with Merge's staff.

We hope this year's program inspires and educates. If Hull is to be an aspiring city, a city worthy of pride, its youth has to be stimulated, involved and engaged in the arts, in culture, in sport and in education. With the way things are going, they’re going to need all the inspiration they can get.

I hope you find something of interest, something to make you think, or something you didn't know (or all of the above!). You can leave us feedback on our Facebook or Twitter, or email us on info@mergearts.org.uk.

Please, get yourself a drink, and enjoy the Festival!

Thanks,
Richard T. Watson
Artistic Director | Merge Arts Festival


Merge is:
Artistic Director: Richard T. Watson

Production Manager: Stefan Ward-Caddle

Publicity Director: Portia Ellis-Woods

Publicity Assistant: Becka Willougby

Education Director: Zoe Hughes

Design by: Becka Willoughby, Will Langdale & Richard T. Watson

With special thanks to:

Professor Alison Yarrington and the University of Hull’s Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
Marianne Lewsley-Stier and iHull
Martin Taylor and staff at the Hull History Centre
Louise Yates and the City Arts Unit
Claire Balfour and staff at Hull City Hall
Barbara Dawson and staff at Northern Academy of Performing Arts
Staff at Hartley’s Tap
Paul Hunter and the New Adelphi Club
Steve Gardham
John Connolly and Bill Meek
Andrew Penny
Dr Jane Thomas & Professor Marion Shaw
Piaf Knight
Lisa Hey
Dale Christmas
Keira Walker
Professor John Stringer
John Morrison
Ian Watson
Felix Hodcroft
Jamie McGarry and Valley Press
Ashley Fisher
Will Langdale
Jonno Witts
Elizabeth Coombs Photography
Sarah Clinch and Hull CVS
The Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn

Protesting the Proms: Israel's Philharmonic Orchestra and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign

London's Royal Albert Hall, home of the BBC Proms, scene of the protest

Last night, for the first time in its 117-year history, BBC Radio 3 stopped its Royal Albert Hall broadcast of a Proms concert because of a politically-motivated protest. Just like that. Mid-performance (Bruch's Violin Concerto, since you ask), taken off the air.

The broadcast started at 7:30pm, which is nothing unusual. Outside the Royal Albert Hall, pro-Palestinian protesters had been vying with pro-Israeli protesters in a shouting match for some hours. Meanwhile, inside, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta, was about to begin their performance. But every time their Indian-born conductor stood ready for a new movement of Bruch's work, the IPO found they couldn't start – protesters inside the hall were making too much noise. The BBC broadcast was taken off-air twice, and radio listeners didn't get to the end of the concert.

The BBC Proms are hardly the place you'd expect to get heckling and disruption so serious it causes an early end to radio broadcasting. This is supposed to be a civilised event, attended by civilised, cultured people. That makes the reasons behind this protest all the more worthy of examination.

A few years ago I was in Birmingham when the REP Theatre staged Behzti (Dishonour), a play featuring rape in a Sikh temple. Local Sikhs found this distressing, understandably, and a couple of hundred of them protested outside the theatre, eventually resulting in the play's run being cut short. But that – and several other disrupted performances that come to mind – had some pretty controversial subject matter, which is what protesters were complaining about. Bruch's Violin Concerto contains nothing especially objectionable; the issue this time was the orchestra itself.

The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is proud of its status as one of the leading cultural ambassadors of the state of Israel, as well as happily recruiting non-Jews to its ranks. Before the 1967 Six-Day War (the one where Israel grabbed a whole load of land while fighting a range of Arab nations), that was fine; Israel was the under-dog surrounded by powerful adversaries, still a young nation defending its right to existence.

But since 1967 and the increasing Israeli expansion into its newly-occupied territories (the West Bank, Gaza), with Israel's reluctance to give up control of the contested Golan Heights, it's rather harder to sympathise with Israel. These days, they're the ones risking international condemnation through their treatment of different ethnic groups, as Palestinian Arabs did in the decades before Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. Since occupying regions such as the West Bank, Israel has been expanding its settlements (of, at best, dubious legal standing) and getting involved in conflicts that do nothing for stability in a troubled region (conflicts that aren't really about Israeli self-defence any more).

In a statement on their website, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – responsible for the protests outside last night's Proms – argue that the IPO has 'lent itself to the official Israeli propaganda campaign titled Brand Israel, which aims to divert attention from Israel's violations of international law and Palestinian rights to its artistic and scientific achievements'. I'm all for promoting the scientific and artistic achievements of Israel (or any other group of people, for that matter), but the IPO's alignment with the Israeli Defence Force is a worrying example of artists getting (perhaps too?) closely involved in politics. I grant you, art and politics can't and shouldn't be entirely separated, but artists lose their ability (maybe even their right) to comment on politics when they get too closely involved. The IPO is quite right to promote Israel's artistic achievements internationally, but performing morale-boosting concerts for the troops (as the IPO has been doing since 1942) implies a condoning of the actions of those troops. Much as I'd like to keep this performance of Bruch's Violin Concerto separate from Israel's encroachment of the West Bank, the IPO itself has made that difficult with their IDF concerts. The Palestinian protest last night has at least been successful in bringing the connection between the two to light.

When I say the Proms is an event for cultured, civilised people, it's worth pointing out that those protesting against the performance aren't themselves uncultured. Far from it; their in-hall protest included what one audience member described as 'singing to the tune of Beethoven's Ode to Joy' – Beethoven's Ninth Symphony features the words of Schiller's poem, To Joy, in its fourth movement. While I can't help thinking that disrupting a classical music concert inside the hall itself runs the risk of making your protest look churlish (dare I say philistine?), using Beethoven's Ninth – with its overarching theme of brotherly love and the constant struggle to improve the human condition – redeems that cause immeasurably.

Thanks to Boeke, for the image of the Royal Albert Hall on Flickr.

The Soloist

Man is a social creature. No matter what the company he keeps, he invariably wants to exist in company.

He – or she, for that matter – also tends to think of himself before others, which is called greed and has led over the centuries to massive differences between the most impoverished and the most wealthy of humanity. There's a line in ITV's recent Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff says he made his fortune by taking advantage of other men's weaknesses – and it's a sentiment that rings very true for all fortunes made on the back of some exploited person.

Exploitation is a big theme hanging over true-story The Soloist. It's the latest film about a gifted person in poverty (and with mental health issues on this occasion), who meets someone that sees his talent and wants to help him. That would be sweet, if it weren't for the fact that the person helping him is reporter for the LA Times – Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) – who features this homeless, schizophrenic prodigy of a musician in his newspaper column and picks up a journalism award for it. As he picks up his award, his ex-wife jokes that he's exploiting this man – Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) – and tells him he should write a book as well as the column. She neglects to mention the film that would be adapted from that book.

Meanwhile, Ayers is slumming it with the 90,000 homeless people of Los Angeles. He's been homeless since running away from the college course that allowed him to play cello in an orchestra, which went downhill once he started hearing voices. Now he's down-sized and plays his two-stringed violin in the streets. He's the soloist of the title, but this story belongs to Lopez. He's the reporter that starts off telling his readers about Ayers, but then gets more involved until he's writing about the ways that he's changing Ayers' life – whether Ayers likes it or not.

While such philanthropy is admirable, it seems misplaced, or perhaps misjudged. Lopez directs his efforts at one man, who only appreciates it some of the time. He's a man uncomfortable indoors, a man who is happiest listening to the sounds of Beethoven's string compositions swelling through the city air and mingling with the sounds of the freeway traffic and building work. Lopez's intrusive 'help' sees him moved to an apartment, and away from the sounds of people that had surrounded him. While it seems an improvement on the crowded slum (crowded mostly with black and mentally handicapped people, the oft-ignored side of America), Ayers has chosen that slum over the apartment he used to have.

It seems the American Dream in which everyone is free to do as s/he pleases has gone sour, as Lopez imposes his help on Ayers while using his story to win awards (and presumably Brownie points at the local philanthropists' club), and a cello teacher tries to convert the prodigy to God.