On your marks, get set, go for London's festival of culture

 
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10 April 2012

With a year to go, exactly, until the world's attention focuses on London, the city's party-planner-in-chief is in bullish, confident mood. Director of the Cultural Olympiad and head honcho of the London 2012 Festival, which starts next Midsummer Day, Ruth Mackenzie is registering a steady tick on her "stressometer" but claims that each new piece of the 2012 arts jigsaw is falling pleasingly into place.

Yet to everyone's surprise except it seems hers, Mackenzie doesn't have a ticket to the hottest party of them all. Like several million others who applied for entry and failed, she won't be going to the Opening Ceremony of the Games - the Olympics' central cultural moment and the bit that everyone on the planet will want to see.

When she tells me this, I am amazed. London 2012's top arts mandarin and chief taste-maker not going to its biggest and most significant theatrical event? She didn't get any of the sports tickets she applied for either, for swimming, gymnastics and athletics. "No, I won't be going, because like a few others, I bid for tickets and wasn't successful," she says drily.

Mackenzie's default tone is dry. You can never be quite sure whether she's ladling on the irony or not. A long-serving arts apparatchik, who cut her teeth at the Nottingham Playhouse in the early 1990s, ran the Manchester International Festival and was an expert arts adviser for many years to the Labour government, she was a late and (in political circles) controversial appointment to Olympic officialdom.

Given just two years to plan and realise the Festival - conceived as a grand finale to the Cultural Olympiad programme itself, which has been running across the UK since 2008 - 53-year-old Mackenzie has had to work at breakneck speed. Her brief was "to come up with a 12-week festival that will match up to the once-in-a-lifetime greatest show on earth, which is the Olympics," she says. And then adds: "Easy peasy."

"It is absolutely the best job in London, but it's also the sort of job where, if you tell colleagues who used to work for, say, the Vienna Festival what you are doing, they say, 'Well, of course you would need five years for that'. When I say, no, I have two, they say: 'What! I'm sorry?'"

So huge amounts of work - but no golden ticket. "I'm one of millions," she says, shrugging. "I did have the sense to know that my chances of getting into the opening ceremony were very, very slim. The opening ceremony is not in my remit."

Film and theatre director Stephen Daldry was hired as executive producer of all the ceremonies a year ago by Locog [the unwieldy acronym for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games] while film-maker Danny Boyle was put in creative charge of the big opener. But even so, you would expect Mackenzie to be invited.

"Come on, play it the other way," insists Mackenzie. "You'd love to write about how all of us on Locog not only get the best jobs of our lives but also get to ponce our way into the thing that millions of people aren't allowed to go to. I'll watch it on the telly. Or maybe I'll have to be in it. That would be a good option."

Whatever Daldry is planning, and she won't tell me anything (if she even knows in great detail, "I wouldn't dream of keeping an eye on Stephen," she says), Mackenzie's festival must somehow equal it in wow factor. Much will be announced in October this year - but yesterday she and Lord Coe revealed the 12 artists who will design the posters for both the Olympic and Paralympic Games, among them Tracey Emin, Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley and Rachel Whiteread. The festival will also co-opt next year's blockbuster exhibitions of Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Damien Hirst, respectively at the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy and Tate Modern, in a real feast of visual art.

"Back in Singapore [when we won the Games] we pledged to put culture back up there with education and sport," says Mackenzie. "We have the best creative industries and the best artists in the world, and we'll show that as clearly as we can."

Down in Bexhill-on-Sea, meanwhile, Richard Wilson will balance a Mini Cooper on the roof of the De La Warr Pavilion and let it teeter gently in the breeze, in homage to the final scene of The Italian Job. Not forgetting - as if we will be able to when the Games begin - Anish Kapoor's 81m-high tangled steel sculpture, a remarkable feat of engineering as much as art, at the heart of the Olympic Park itself.

"If you ask me what might well be the most powerful artistic legacy of the Games, I'd say the Kapoor," says Mackenzie. "I can claim no credit for it. But it's ravishing."

The London 2012 Festival is part curated by Mackenzie - like a critic's pick, where she chooses the best on offer in London next summer and nicks it, magpie-like, for the Olympics - and part commissioned (see box). Naturally there will be a large international flavour alongside the obvious British stuff - the RSC will oversee a big dollop of internationally inspired Shakespeare, for example (including a production of Romeo and Juliet by the Iraq National Theatre). There will be a full programme of comedy at the Hackney Empire, a food element too; and an unannounced (and unlikely-sounding) Olympic gardening contribution, presumably involving Chelsea.

"For a great party, you need a great atmosphere, some great food and great music," she says. "And then you need some events that you will remember for the rest of your life. For me, the real test will be how many people over the next 10 or 20 years tell me they were at an Olympic festival event and that it was completely unforgettable."

The soundtrack, she reveals, will be provided by The Proms, by Radio One's Big Weekend, a "River of Music" along the Thames featuring musicians from every country participating in the Games and, yes, an official Olympic song. Alas, the band is still a secret: I suggest sunny Elbow and Mackenzie mimes the act of zipping her lips.

Can austerity Britain afford all this (the budget for the whole Cultural Olympiad stands at £93.4million, of which £45million will be spent on the Festival - money in large part from the Lottery but also from central government via the Arts Council, and from private sponsorship by BT, BP and Panasonic)?

More to the point, isn't London a party city every year? Surely we've got enough on offer at any time to more than satisfy the claims of a world-class culture.

Mackenzie acknowledges that this line of criticism is sharpened by the recent swingeing cuts to the arts. "It's a completely understandable argument but the counter-argument, which obviously I believe or I wouldn't be doing this job, is that this is a chance to do something better even than our normal best."

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is determined to boost tourism as an economic legacy of the whole 2012 shebang, and the 20,000 unaccredited journalists and TV crews expected in London next year, without passes to the stadia, will be strongly encouraged to experience and write about the UK's fabulous culture.

But Mackenzie has also been inspired by the big idea of "Olympic truce". Every four years the UN passes a resolution calling on all nations to stop fighting each other for the duration of the contest.

"The point of the truce in ancient Greece was that everyone could stop and listen to the artists and learn from them, as well as watch the sport. Art was absolutely integral to the Games then ... So I have been able to say to some of the artists we have commissioned, if the world stops and listens to you, what is it you would like to say?" Of course, if we are still bombing Tripoli in 2012, no one expects us actually to stop. "But, hey," says Mackenzie, "we can try ...

"When one really gets serious about legacy, well there's the economic legacy for the arts, there's the legacy for communities that rely on tourism and then there's world peace. It's not bad, really."

On paper the London 2012 Festival should be very good indeed. The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Board reads like a consortium of London's top-dog arts chiefs. Chaired by Lord Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House, it also numbers the Tate's Sir Nick Serota and the British Museum's Neil MacGregor; Vikki Heywood from the RSC, BBC director general Mark Thompson, Barbican head Sir Nicholas Kenyon and South Bank artistic director Jude Kelly.

"I've got the best and scariest people you could possibly wish to have as your bosses," deadpans Mackenzie. "If I do a bad job, it's their fault."

None of them gets free tickets either, by the way. And if you, like the rest of us, won't get to see Jessica Ennis or Rebecca Adlington in the flesh, you might try your luck with Cate Blanchett or Jude Law instead. Not bad substitutes, after all.

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