Artistic Director's Note to Merge 2011

They say that a band's second album is always the hardest, the 'difficult second album', so I like to think of Merge 2011 as the 'difficult second Festival'. Once we've got through that, we should be ready to take over the world and be as all-conquering as [insert your favourite band's name here].

Last year's Festival involved just over one hundred students as participants, and this year we've been even more ambitious. The Festival is split across several host venues and now happens over four days. It's all been designed to allow any audience member to see just about everything on offer. You could also look at our lovely little website, www.mergearts.org.uk.

There's a lot of stuff, so have a look around. We've got theatre, jazz, classical music, poetry, dance, performance art, workshops, burlesque, visual art...and it's all about showing off Hull's artistic scene.

Like any good band leader, I should thank the band. The Festival needs several people working hard on it through the year, and those people are listed below. I'm grateful to all of them. Once again, the University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences has funded the Festival, and we're again grateful for their generosity in doing so.

The Merge band has also relied on our host venues for somewhere to put our second album; this year they are the Albemarle Music Centre, Fruit and the Ringside. We'd like to thank staff at each for their hard work and patience over the last year.

For Merge 2011 we experimented with some run-up events called EarlyMerge, which were hosted by the Haworth Arms, Pave, Hull's History Centre and the Ringside, while workshops have been hosted by Hull College – so we extend our thanks to them too.

Finally, can I thank you for coming along? I hope you find at least one performance or artwork that really makes you think and shows that Hull has artistic talent to be proud of. That would be a good legacy for this year's Festival.

Once again, thank you for coming – have a look around, see some shows, and I hope to see you for next year's Festival.

Richard T. Watson, Artistic Director

PS. Enjoy the album!

The Merge Arts Festival is:

Artistic Director: Richard T. Watson

Finance Director/Co-Producer: Alison Best

Technical Directors: Jon Cole & Adam Foley

Publicity Director: Rachael Abbey

Education Director: Zoe Hughes

Designer: Will Langdale

With special thanks to:

Professor Valerie Sanders and the University of Hull's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Sarah-Jane Dickenson and staff at the University's Department of Music and Drama

Chris Maynard and staff at the Albemarle Music Centre

Dean Shakespeare and staff at Fruit

Darren Bunting, Anna Fox and staff at the Ringside

Arike Oke and staff at the Hull History Centre

Staff at the Haworth Arms and Pave bar

Jamie McGarry

Lucy Thurlow, Hayley Nikolay and staff at Hull College

Simon Bedford and Hoipolloi Theatre

Keira Walker

Janet Pearce and Marianne Lewsley-Stier

Jonno Witts

Elizabeth Coombs

The Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn

A Dream Play at Hull Truck

Hull College's staging of Caryl Churchill's adaptation of Strindberg's A Dream Play asks the question: Where is Paradise? It's certainly not in a Churchill play. And definitely not this one.

In her defence – and it's not often I defend Caryl Churchill – it's not all her fault. The original material is from one August Strindberg, a Swedish playwright (with a fragile grip on reality at the best of times) who was leaving behind his Naturalism phase and heading into his Expressionist phase (via a near-death experience) when he wrote it – basing it around the patterns of, you guessed it, a dream (clue's in the name). That explains rather a lot about A Dream Play. Once you put it through the filter of Churchill – who has an apparent objection to giving her characters anything resembling a context, and here rejects character continuity – and hand it to a young company in a studio space...well, the poor play didn't stand a chance.

This production has failed in overcoming the problems with staging this script – in which (apparently) Agnes the Angel comes down to Earth to find out what it's like being a human (see also: The Bible (Feminist version)) – because they try to make it naturalistic. In the black box, the scenes that they play so straightly all appear in the same place, and there's no sense of movement or of change. But change is crucial to Agnes journey through the nature of humanity; the very essence of (what I shall optimistically call) the story is that she goes from a state of ignorance to knowing all about being human...poor girl.

A poor girl she is, indeed. Agnes' various discoveries – shown in hodgepodge of scenes which are difficult to link together in the mind – lead her to despair of all human life. Considering what she sees, that's no surprise. But if what she sees were somehow to be shown differently... Strindberg wrote the original as a piece of Expressionism, while he was turning his back on all he'd done before, ie. Naturalism. With Churchill thrown into the mix as well, it'd be no bad thing to throw any attempt at Naturalistic staging out of the window and give full vent to any Expressionist – even Absurdist – ideas. It's a script that lends itself to playing with images and concepts, not words and characters.

The main message of Churchill's script – one oft repeated – seems to be: Life is pretty dire, and everyone has problems. Thanks for that pearl, Caryl, thanks...