The ‘ten feet away’ International festival for me.

I was involved in this festival from an early stage, I went to St. Petersburg as part of the festival, I was part of some of the decision making and finally I photographed a lot of the event. This is as honest a review of the festival as I can come up with.

I would like to begin before listing what was problematic by saying overall the festival was, in fact is a total success and I will repeat that at the end of this rant.

I suppose the biggest difficulty that many of us have with the festival, is its relationship to homelessness. What information was available about homelessness especially in an international sense, as it was an international festival and what way did much of the evening entertainment have to do with homelessness? I have given this some consideration and discussed it with a number of people and decided this. As for more information about homelessness here and abroad there could have been more available for certain but primarily the festival was there to celebrate people’s extraordinary skills and creativity, it just turns out that this celebration of people was geared towards a part of society that is often overlooked and mainly misunderstood, the homeless and the ex-homeless and I can say with hand on heart it achieved that.

The second part of this question on the festival’s relationship to homelessness is that many of the performances, especially the high end performances like The Samba, Jan’s band, Actors for Refugees and the Brilliant Circus performances, that the festival ended on, had nothing to do with homelessness and was very sparse on the ground with people who are or have experienced homelessness. I really thought about this not really able to justify it when I thought, ‘wait there’, Why do I have to justify it? Most of this stuff was the real highlights of the festival for me. I have been homeless, will probably be again in my life and I was amazed and thrilled to see this stuff and I think I can confidently say that everyone who was there was as well. This festival was a celebration, a celebration of people so why shouldn’t they be entertained and experience spectacle as part of this celebration? These performances were important parts of festival overall. I will just say the balance of this against homeless involvement could have been weighted a little more towards the latter. Some of which include a DJ from Hungary, The publishers of the street paper Podomoi from Russia, People from tent city in Japan, Jackie, the platform, Steetwise opera, The documentaries presented by Deba to name but a few.

I have heard some stuff about the numbers, or lack of people who came to the festival especially from those who organised it. Well they would because they have higher expectation than people who do not have such a direct connection with the festival. In my opinion anyone who thinks too few people went to the festival are wrong. I have been to a full blown festival with fairground rides and top name bands with less people (no lie). Yes there could have been more people but also there could have been much less. At lease 400 people took part at some point in the festival over its 3 days and 4 nights. That is a fair amount of people for your buck.

The final things that can defiantly be learned from the festival was basic technical stuff which only gets better the more you do something. These would be like better organisation, preparation and sign posting for the workshops and… actually that’s it really.

As I said I was going to end on a positive and to me overall the festival was a great success and should most defiantly be repeated, bigger, with even more attractions, to bring in even more diverse people. I was there photographing it and spending much of the time in the depths of the basement, doing the photo-booth, while many of you reading this got to experience it. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did.

See you next time, love Joe

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