Edinblog Final Week: Home Stretch

The picture above is the view from where I’m staying in Edinburgh. It’s a beautiful castle, and every night you can hear the tattoo and watch the flaming torches on the walls and the fireworks.

It’s a reminder that there is literally a whole different festival happening alongside and above the fringe. Actually there are a number of festivals, including the book festival and the TV festival. It’s all overwhelming and great.

But today the nominations come out for all the awards and the people who think they’re in the running will be on tenterhooks. For the rest of us, there are choices; a grumpy resentment of the structures like awards that seem to set us against each other in competition, quiet conversations that border on conspiracy theory in bars about how the big institutions dominate the awards, making sure that their acts are the ones that get buzz.

I heard the other day “[x publication] is only coming to shows that have award buzz, but the awards only choose acts that have been covered in [x publication]”. I never know how true that kind of stuff is. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was entirely fabricated, and then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all entirely true. In a festival with more than 4000 shows, it’s impossible for a panel of fewer than ten judges to see and assess everything on its merits. You couldn’t do it with any other product, let alone something as subjective as art.

As someone who has always been somewhat to the side of “buzz”, I’m happy enough to stand on my happy solid patch of pavement and watch all the glitz and glamour and finger-guns networking through the windows, though there is a partly deliberate choice to imagine I wouldn’t like what they’re serving at the big table anyway.

It maybe reminds me a little bit of when I was at the Perth Fringe and a friendly colleague invited me to the beach with some friends of his. I told my friend Paulie about it, and he said “isn’t that a nude beach?” I showed up, and indeed it was a nude beach, with lots of friendly naked performers lounging happily in the Australian sun. The interesting thing was how quickly I began to feel awkward for having clothes on.

We all know the important things, and what makes us feel good and comfortable, and it’s not arbitrarily assigned external signifiers of value. But when everyone around you is enthusiastically nude, or very artistically anxious about status symbols and the rewards of prizes, it’s hard not to wish you were the kind of act who got that kind of recognition, or the kind of person who was happy being naked among acquaintances.

I don’t think I judge people for having awards hopes, or being disappointed that they aren’t in the running or that they’ve been overlooked. I do have a slightly contrarian streak that makes me not want to worry about things other people worry a lot about. Which is a bit stupid, because sometimes there’s a reason everyone’s worrying about something (ie, it’s important?)

I also know that I don’t know how I would feel if everyone else wasn’t worried about it.

And those are my confused thoughts about awards, I guess. I didn’t expect this update to be about that at all, which (ha) probably indicates that I’m more concerned with the whole palaver than I think I am.

Xx

A