'More beanbags, fewer barriers' at next year's Edinburgh festival
The Guardian|November 14, 2023
The Grammy-winning violinist Nicola Benedetti has revealed that next year's Edinburgh international festival will feature many more shows where the barriers between audiences and artists will be removed.
Severin Carrell
'More beanbags, fewer barriers' at next year's Edinburgh festival

She said next August's festival, featuring a revival of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen in its original form, would include numerous shows similar in thinking to a Hungarian production this year in which the audience sat on beanbags among the orchestra.

That community spirit, she added, had been exemplified by the opening event this year's festival, when 500 amateur and professional musicians played multiple open-air shows in the gardens beneath Edinburgh Castle.

Benedetti, who became the first woman and the first Scot to direct the festival last year, said those felt productions "landed incredibly well" with festivalgoers. Many she had spoken to "resoundingly" they needed shared experiences with less formality, where traditional relationships - the audience in seats and performers on a stage - were either less rigid or dissolved.

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