With March 2017’s Heads Up Festival over and out, Dave Windass attempts to make sense of it all, helped by memorable closer The Rave Space.
So it’s around 36 hours since Heads Up Festival’s eighth season drew to a close. And, as is the usual case around about this time, I’m still attempting to process what happened over the course of the last two weekends and the days between.
Also being processed is The Rave Space, a stunning festival finale provided by Will Dickie, who first joined us at our second festival with his exceptional outdoor piece Team of the Decades.
But more of The Rave Space later.
Heads Up. Every season I’ve had a momentary lapse about the point of it all and considered walking away. We’re a small team and sometimes this all seems to be an unfathomable burden that we brought on ourselves four years ago. The very real concern that I have, that runs through my mind continually but completely overwhelms and overtakes me with each and every season, when dealing with venues and ticketing and promotion and co-promoters and a host of truly amazing artists, is that this is a complete and total distraction that threatens our ability to make and create our own work. We’re artists who became accidental producers because nobody else was doing this. Silly us.
We’ll have a minor spat just before things get going as we attempt to get it together and what should be enormous fun feels anything but. This season, things were exacerbated by having to deal with the external juggernaut of a force that is 2017. It’s not true, but this is how I often feel, that, in the words of The Band (which I heard sat in post-festival comedown mode surrounded by people that I love in a boozer yesterday), in the extraoardinary effort required to shift a mere handful of tickets that will ensure that each production gets the audience it deserves, “you put the load right on me.” I write this in the knowledge that other producers and promoters in this fine city of ours, and beyond here, also feel the same way and might take succour from what is, most very definitely, an overshare.
Then the shows roll into town. And what we always knew to be the case when we put the programme together is writ large. Every piece of work is unbelievably brilliant. The tension subsides, the ill feeling slips away, we realise we like each other and that we’re good at this, and we start to relax and enjoy ourselves. Every piece of work is a highlight for entirely different reasons, every bit of audience feedback invaluable, every shared moment with, say, 1-3 year olds and their accompanying adults in Neverland, jaw droppingly beautiful, time spent with Battersea Arts Centre’s producing team a joy, every after-show jape possibly a late night too far, but sharing a corner of a dance floor with Theatre Ad Infitum at the Wow Hull after party sticks in the mind as a moment when I proudly, albeit briefly, thought, hey, we brought these people and their fine, important work to Hull.
And in the post-festival aftermath, in that short window when we’re thinking that this is great and absolutely what we should be doing, I’ve got a sense that Heads Up should get bigger and better and grow beyond our wildest dreams and be around forever, and that I’ll always be involved. I write this in the knowledge that the small team I’m a part of might feel this too and that we can chat about this later today, and so I don’t forget how I feel right now, when I start to get in a spin about us having to do it all over again for festival nine, which is coming in October 2017.
Some aspects of programming a festival are astonishingly and outstandingly self-indulgent. I love the Adelphi club, as every right-thinking, live music-loving scoundrel in the city does. I have never been in a band that made it beyond the bedroom, so one of the few regrets I have is that I’ve never stood on that stage with a low-slung guitar round my neck and a foot on the monitor. My DJing days also ended at the very point that superstar DJs rose to prominence, so, as much as I could see myself proffering the finest ever set at Residents, or boring people to tears with too much A Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy at Represent, my inability to mix tunes seamlessly ensures that won’t happen anytime soon. We took Chris Brett Bailey’s This Is How We Die into the Adelphi in 2015 and Chris’s jaw-droppingly astounding rant and wall of sound left people reeling so we’ve always wanted to return there. I love dance music in all its forms. I love dancing like nobody’s watching. I meditate and know the power of taking deep four second breaths. Indeed, meditation changed my life. Will Dickie’s The Rave Space, a piece of work that fuses live art and club culture, and is a meditation on life and what it all means, gave me the chance to persuade Jacko to let us in to his venue once again, indulge my desire to dance and breathe, and for me to vicariously be involved in a piece of work there.
Naturally and understandably, Jacko was resistant to letting a load of theatre sorts in to his nocturnal nest at 10am on a Saturday morning. But, boy, am I glad he did. We got to hang out with Will, Hayley Hill, Chris Collins, Jesal and Fabiola for the day. We got to see the run. We couldn’t wait for 8.30pm to come round and for an audience to be in front of it.
There have been many memorable, life-changing shows at Heads Up. While I’m still processing and gathering thoughts on what it means and what it meant, The Rave Space feels a real highlight of four years of this. Poignant for Will, due to the recent real-life death of one of the characters and his friends within (Angie, represented by a vape), this is the finest close to our festival to date. Drum and bass and choreographed dance moves merged with MCing and cut-up actuality interviews, exploring rave and religion and a sense of community that is under threat. My life, as I imagine most people’s, feels like a series of disconnected fragments that very rarely make sense as a whole. While I may still be high on festival fever, The Rave Space felt, on Saturday night, like it was joining the dots for me. As Hayley went around the room, looked people in the eyes and declared “You are loved… and you are loved… and you are loved,” everything and everybody I’ve encountered was connected. And Heads Up Festival felt like home.
Heads Up Festival returns in October 2017. Visit www.headsuphull.co.uk for updates and news.