Brighton Festival returns in May with an innovative three-week programme of international significance. HANNAH COLLISSON speaks to this year’s guest director, author Ali Smith.

Award-winning author Ali Smith cannot contain her enthusiasm for the festival programme.

Literature, theatre, art, music and dance are all present, with legendary filmmaker Agnès Varda, author Margaret Atwood, Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti and Tony Award-winning playwright Richard Nelson just a few of the names in the line-up.

“I think the programme is tremendously strong, every time I open it I get excited,” Ali said.

“I know how much nourishment I take from art, how much we all take from art. There is something about that giving quality.

“A festival in which you can put all the arts on a stage at once and allow them to give between each other, it made absolute sense, it just fell into place.”

Brighton Festival this year runs from May 2 to 24, and has three themes, Art and Nature, Crossing Places and Taking Liberty, all stemming from Ali’s love of birds.

In fact the bird motif reoccurs throughout the programme.

Ali said: “I’m very interested in the ways in which birds live and the fact that the festival takes place in May – that’s the point of the year where I spent a lot of time gazing out the dormer window watching for the swifts to come back.

“It just opened from that into the idea of birds that cross the world with no borders, to get here.”

This led naturally to exploring the idea of blurred boundaries between different art forms, and seeing things in new ways.

The Booker Prize-nominated Scottish author, whose novels include The Accidental, There But For The, and How To Be Both, is well known for pushing form with her writing, and this is why she is well-suited to the role of guest director of the mixed arts festival, according to chief executive of Brighton Dome and Brighton Festival Andrew Comben.

She said: “I met Andrew and sat down with him to see what it would entail.

“We sat and talked for quite a long time, ignoring our lunch because we were talking about all sorts of arts and all sorts of possibilities after which, there wasn’t even a saying of “yes”, it just had happened.

“I sat down with the team the first time I came to Brighton and they blew me away.

“There is a level of understanding which meant that immediately my ideas were met and enhanced, and I knew I was in the right hands.”

She said that when it came to programming the festival, the focus was not on selecting people according to the themes, but rather on who would be the ideal people to invite to a festival if they could.

One of those is French filmmaker Agnès Varda, recipient of the European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, who is making a rare visit to the UK to present an illustrated lecture.

Ali said: “I can’t believe Agnès Varda is coming, it’s so exciting. She’s such a versatile figure, and is at the beginning and the centre of the festival.”

Another event that Ali picks out is the talk by Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood and partner Graeme Gibson on birds and conservation issues; both are bird enthusiasts.

Ali said: “You can see it in everything that [Atwood] writes if you look.

“They are a partnership which when you put them together, they will take flight, because they are passionate and so interested about the ways in which we hurt and we preserve, as human beings.”

Several artists are producing work especially for this year’s Brighton Festival, Ali said.

These include leading performance artist, and NASA’s first artist-in-residence Laurie Anderson, who has curated a piece called All The Animals, responding to the festival themes.

Jeanette Winterson will deliver the New Writing South Annual Lecture on Boldness In The Face Of A Blank Page.

Ali added: “There will be a lot of brand new writing at the On Liberty event as well, which is a celebration of the Human Rights Act.

“And what a chance to see the piece about Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce, by Mabou Mines (Lucia’s Chapters Of Coming Forth By Day).

“Edmund de Waal is going to come and give a talk about what the notion of object is in art. He’s such a good speaker, and we have got a plethora of female film directors talking about their work and others’ work. The festival is bristling with possibility.”

Ali understands how some people may feel that they do not relate to some art forms, but said this can change.

“Personally, I think I have blind spots until I go and see or experience something, then I know it’s not a blind spot, it’s just that I haven’t done it – for instance in ballet and some classical music, which I think I know nothing about,” she said.

“But then you sit down and you hear something and see something and you’ve experienced the story in another form, you’ve felt this feeling some other way.

“It is always about the renewal of the senses.”

Enabling children and young people to be exposed to the arts and have positive experiences is something that Ali is passionate about.

She described her cultural horizons being broadened as a teenager when Eden Court Theatre opened in her hometown.

“When the theatre opened in Inverness, which I think was a huge life-changing thing for the town, I went along to see everything.

“On Sunday nights they had films from all over the world. I was 15 or 16 and suddenly the whole world had come to my town.

“I knew things that otherwise I would never have known simply from watching a film of Agnès Varda’s called L’Une Chante, L’Autre pas, a film by Jaques Tatit called Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, a sequence of Woody Allen’s, Céline Et Julie Vont En Bateau by Jacques Rivette.

“I know I was formed by these things, I know that they gave me the shape I take.”

Brighton Festival begins with the Children’s Parade, with 82 schools taking part.

Ali said: “I wish all festivals started with a children’s parade – what a fantastic thing to do; 5,000 kids from across this area, all taking part in a way which is really responsive.

“The children’s programme is fantastic, it’s bursting with exciting things.”

She mentions one event for young people, which is all about Tove Jansson, the Finnish writer who created The Moomins, featuring author Philip Pullman, Sophia Jansson (Tove Jansson’s niece) and author Philip Ardargh, and another event with former Children’s Laureate and best-selling author Jacqueline Wilson.

However it is not only children who will be inspired by this year’s programme.

Ali said: “When the first man killed the first mammoth then drew the first mammoth on the wall, it was the urge to kill to eat but also to preserve and to understand and to see, and art touches us at those points of nourishment and mortality and living.

“Art is for everybody, and everybody makes it. Everybody must have access to it and know that it is for them.”

Ali said that art reveals much about how we live, where we live, what is happening, has happened, and will happen in the future.

In this sense it is impossible to disentangle it from politics, she adds.

She said: “The fundamental things of being are all packed into that three-letter word “art”.

“It cannot help but be revelatory, so it cannot help but be political, especially around the General Election, which falls in the first week of the festival.

“You’ve got a figure like Shami Chakrabarti who is coming before the election and after the election and is a great articulator of where we are. Art is the lens to see where we live and what’s really happening.”

Ali described the squeeze on arts funding as “heinous”.

She said: “This Government has cut back and cut back on the arts in schools. Stop that now.

“Put the arts back in. This is the point at which it delivers most fully and most richly.

“We will see what will happen when we have not looked after and allowed that full development of those fundamental human things.”

Ali herself is not one to steal the spotlight despite her significant contribution to Brighton Festival and the high regard she is held in within literary circles and beyond (she was awarded a CBE for services to literature in the 2015 New Year honours).

She will be in Brighton during the festival and making a number of appearances.

She said: “Every Sunday except for the first Sunday I am going to do a little event in the Onca Gallery, by which I mean that there are only 25 seats, so it can be properly intimate, so we can really talk.

“I’m going to be introducing lots of people, mainly writers – Masha Gessen, the women’s rights activist and writer; Margaret Atwood and Graham Gibson, coming to talk about birds.

“I’m introducing a debate called The Inequality Conundrum with Polly Toynbee and others.

“I’ll be popping up to do introductory things, and will be running off to see what’s on in other parts of the festival because there are so many things that I want to see at once, God knows how I’m going to get to do it.”

Ali added: “Putting together this festival has for me been an eye-opening communal act.

“I sat down with some ideas, and it became a form, and the form is organic.

“When you sit down and have the conversation, the dialogue that is behind something which is an open platform for all the arts, the sense of vitality just speaks.”

For the full Brighton Festival programme visit brightonfestival.org.

Ali Smith’s special mentions

Sunday In The Gallery With Ali Smith – May 10/17/24, Onca gallery, 3pm, free but ticketed (limited to 25 people)
Agnès Varda – Talk, installation, and film screenings. See festival programme.
Children’s Parade – May 2, procession from Kensington Street to Madeira Drive, from 10.30am, free.
On Liberty – hosted by Shami Chakrabarti, May 4, Brighton Dome Concert Hall, 8pm,
£10
Jeanette Winterson – Boldness In The Face Of A Blank Page, May 7, Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, 7.30pm, £10.
Mabou Mines (New York) – Lucia’s Chapters Of Coming Forth By Day, May 7 to 9, Theatre Royal.
Sophia Jansson, Philip Ardagh, Philip Pullman...On Tove Jansson – May 9, Sallis Benney Theatre, 7.30pm, £10 (age 14+).
A Morning With Jacqueline Wilson – May 10, Brighton Dome Concert Hall, 11am, £6 (age 7+).
Masha Gessen – The Harriet Martineau Lecture, May 17, Brighton Dome Studio Theatre, 8pm, £10.
Edmund de Waal – I Placed A Jar, May 18, Studio Theatre, 7.30pm, £10.
Laurie Anderson –  All The Animals, May 24, Brighton Dome Concert Hall, 8pm, £20/£22.50.
Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson – May 24, Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, 8pm, £10.