My name is David and soon I’ll find out whether audiences at the Science Museum can catch a stage-diving Dolly Parton. Since September, we’ve been in residence at the Science Museum preparing for the premiere of our interactive theatre work Best Festival Ever: How To Manage A Disaster.
In 2011, the University College London Environment Institute gave us the challenge of creating a theatre show looking at concepts from climate and systems science. Over the last three years we’ve created a work in which a playing audience seated around a table take control of managing their own complex system: a music festival.
A music festival is an excellent example of a complex system. In a lot of ways, a festival is like a temporary city, with tens of thousands of people coming together for a few days on a patch of land. Over the course of the show we examine some of the interesting ways in which systems behave and ask ourselves: how can we recognise and better think about the systems we’re part of?
I don’t want to give away too much about the show, but I thought I might share some of what audiences have to do to put on the best festival ever.
1. Programming the lineup
Obviously you want the best possible artists to play your festival: Do you take the 9-piece reggae collective over the teenage Youtube sensation? The folk ensemble or the glitchy electronica artist? But you’ll need to find sponsors to pay for them. As always in complex systems, there are trade-offs. Some sponsors may offer more, but may also be ethically… interesting. Whatever you decide, you’ll have to live with.
2. Building a festival site
Putting on a festival sometimes means constructing, inhabiting and packing down an entire temporary city. You’ll be in charge of organising the layout of your festival – placing gates, stages, food stalls and face-painting stalls – and then making everything both quickly and beautifully. Of course, when everything is connected, decisions made in one place will have consequences throughout the festival, often in unexpected ways.
3. Electricity
Festivals usually don’t run off the main grid. You’ll have to take control of the generators, ensuring that power goes to where it’s most needed. Managing this common-pool resource will involve prioritising: amazing laser light show on stage two vs turning on the water filters to stop sewage leaking into the river that flows into the nearby village.
4. Concerts
The most crucial part of any music festival, and also the hardest to manage. Can your security guards prevent fights from breaking out in the moshpit? Can you get the band onstage and hitting all the right solos? And are you ready if Justin Timberlake decides to jump right into the moshpit?
We’ll be presenting these shows at the Science Museum on 17-19 November, along with climate and systems scientists talking about the ways in which this show intersects with their own work. Book your tickets here.