Ambitions City Promotion made Grenswerk hopeless.

Festival Grenswerk was told on Tuesday 21 February that it must stop after three successful years because it does not match the ambitions of Stichting Enschede Promotie. The festival set up in 2009 was given a thick set of demands by the alderman that it could not meet after a scathing report by this revamped VVV.

Logical though.

The stated requirement of 50,000 unique visitors does not even reach a seasonal hit like Oerol. The €400,000 the city of Enschede had set aside for Grenswerk will be used to plug other holes in the budget.

'A great pity that the festival will not get the chance to prove itself,' thinks Rein van der Lugt, who, together with Harm Mannak, founded the festival in 2009. More summer festivals had already failed, and there should be something that would not only bring music, but also theatre and visual arts. And now the National Touring Opera had just announced its intention to produce the complete Ring des Nibelungen. That, and the accompanying budget was every reason for a celebration.

At least the city council thought so: the party had to be accessible and art at the same time. Naturally, the Muziekkwartier partners had to be involved, but also other cultural institutions in Enschede, including Twentse Welle.

Disastrous

From the outset, the municipality pursued a half-hearted policy, which mainly required many compromises. In the process, mutual cooperation was disastrous from the start. The National Reisopera was happy for the parts of the Ring to be included in the festival's publicity, but did not have much else to do with it; after all, those operas were already fixed and co-financed by the state and province. What the other parties wanted to do around it was of little concern to the Reisopera.

Of course, that must have been a shame for Grenswerk creator Harm Mannak, who at the time was involved in the event wearing four hats: he was (and still is) director of the Orchestra of the East (now Netherlands Symphony Orchestra), was also interim director of the Stadsschouwburg and director of the Muziekkwartier. In addition, he was a board member of Grenswerk, which also gave him a major role in organising the festival. And this, in turn, led to dissatisfaction among the other partners. In the process, money flows were completely unclear. This was partly because Grenswerk was a project of the Stadsschouwburg's project bureau and that the festival's business manager was also the boss of the project bureau, so this person had to beg for money from himself.

Overhead

In that first edition, the unclear organisational relationships and laborious connections created a huge mountain of overheads, amounting to 3 tonnes, leaving only a tonne for programming. The first edition was therefore strictly evaluated by the city council. The main point was that it was not clear exactly how things worked out financially. The only way out was to make it independent: its own foundation, its own budget and no ambiguity about who was responsible for what.

Artistic director of the first hour Rein van der Lugt sought and found a successor in Yvonne Franquinet, who was available for new challenges after a difficult period at Utrecht's Festival aan de Werf. At least since Grenswerk's corporatisation, relations have been clearer. The then business manager of Grenswerk has moved on to become director of the Stadsschouwburg and the board is separate from the partners, creating space to develop its own artistic face.

Coffin

Perhaps motivated by the ambiguities surrounding the financial accountability of the first festival, however, the municipality of Enschede put a big nail in Grenswerk's coffin: it only wanted to make money available for a new edition after the previous one had been evaluated. Politically decent perhaps, but artistically irresponsible, as a festival with ambitions often needs to be able to make agreements with acts and artists two years in advance.

Despite positive evaluations in 2010 and hopeful results in 2011, the festival did not yet gain a foothold as a connector between high and low art. Major problem for the festival appears to be that the most visible - and artistically the least interesting - parts (Enschede by the sea, the Lego church) were seen by the average inhabitant and visitor as stand-alone events; the link with Grenswerk was not made.

Major differences of opinion remained between the various partners on this and on the direction to be taken. It does not help that due to all kinds of budget cuts, all cultural institutions are in a survival mode sit, with cooperation being the least priority.

Marketing

An interesting role here is played by the Enschede Marketing Foundation, which advises the municipality on all subsidised events. In November 2011, this glorified VVV, set up in 2009 on the ruins of less successful predecessors, was already highly critical of Grenswerk, but Enschede Promotion has also never made a secret of the fact that it itself would have liked to have received the four tons of subsidy to spend on events that put the city on the map nationwide.

A letter with new requirements for the festival followed. With this, the Alderman of Culture sat in the festival programmer's chair even more than before, by explicitly interfering with the content. The new set of demands was impracticable for the current management and so there was nothing left but to declare the end of the (yet another) festival.

The Enschede city council formally prattles on a bit, but actually agrees with this decision: trust in the cooperating parties is completely gone. The majority of Enschede's entrepreneurs and residents are also fine with it: the arrival of the Glass House in December will bring much more publicity, visitors and income.