Fund Delays Wreak Havoc With Albanian Festivals

Albania Dace Meeting 2010 | Courtesy of International festival of Modern and Contemporary Dance

Tourism is booming in Albania. But visitors and locals alike will have to do without an array of international cultural events this year, some of which had become a tradition over the better part of the last decade. 

The International Theater Festival of Butrint 2000, the International Dance Festival in Durres, the festival of Poetry Poeteka,  the International Festival of Operatic Singers “Marije Kraja”, the International Festival of Alternative Theatre “Skampa” , have not yet received funding this year from the Ministry of Culture, forcing organizers to postpone them to the fall. 

While the ministry says the funding problem is down to the restructuring of the authority that delivers state aid to artistic projects, organizers fear the delays threaten the festivals’ very survival. 

In November 2010, Albania’s parliament passed a new law that altered the administration of funding for many cultural projects, evaluated at 1.2 million euro annually.

The new law mandated the creation of a new National Centre of the Arts and Culture, tasked with managing and distributing arts funds. 

However, nine months on, the new institution is not yet up and running, leaving the cultural projects that depend on its funds in a state of limbo. 

Adding to the problems, the culture ministry has lacked a minister for the last three months, since Ferdinand Xhaferaj quit the post in April to run as candidate for the ruling Democratic Party in the mayoral election in the city of Durres. 

Observers of Albania’s cultural scene also blame the May local election for the delays in funding of summer festivals. Some suspect that spending on events in the campaign drained the ministry’s coffers.  

Albania Dace Meeting 2009 | Courtesy of International festival of Modern and Contemporary Dance

The directors of several summer festivals that now have been postponed to autumn say they contacted the Ministry of Culture several times without receiving a response.
Now they have written an open letter to the ministry and to the Prime Minister, Sali Berisha, arguing their case and pleading for a solution. 

“The International Theatre Festival of Butrint 2000 was supposed to take place from 17 to 23 July but has been postponed to September,” wrote Alfred Bualoti, president of the festival, which takes place in the ancient city’s Roman amphitheatre.  

“In the Albanian art scene, we cannot afford to cover our festivals with private funding, so we need the support of public institutions for more than half of our budget,” he added.  

The Theater Festival usually receives 30 to 40 per cent of its money from the culture ministry, while the rest comes from the municipality of Saranda and private donors. 

“The institutions in Saranda, near to where Butrinti 2000 takes place, have provided us with a ridiculous amounts of money, even though the festival is very important for the town,” Bualoti lamented. 

Gjergj Prevazi, organizer of the International Dance Meeting, a dance festival in Durres, which should already been held in May and has now been postponed to September, faces a similar predicament.

Albania Dace Meeting 2009 | Courtesy of International Festival of Modern and Contemporary Dance

“We were obliged to postpone our festival because the ministry did not issue a call for fund-raising,” Prevazi said.

“We’ve made a compromise by postponing our festival to autumn but the rescheduling damages our image, making it difficult to preserve a serious relationship with our partners and with the companies that intended to participate,” Prevazi added.

Although the dance meeting usually gets a generous grant from the municipality of Durres, this was not the case this year. 

Because of political infighting between opposition and ruling party city councilors ahead of the May 8 local election, the passage of a city budget for 2011 was delayed till the summer, blocking the funding of cultural events.   

Municipal funding is key to many festivals and cultural activities held in Albania.
“We wouldn’t be able to organize such a festival if the mayor didn’t support us systematically,” Klajd Marku, director of the Apollon Theatre Festival, in the city of Fier, said. 

“We have already been obliged to cut out awards and the number of the companies we invite from abroad to a minimum,” he added. 

Adonis Filipi, a theater director who organizes the Skampa Alternative Theater Festival in Elbasan, says the enforced rescheduling of the festival to the fall is affecting the quality of participating theater groups.   

“This kind of silence [from the ministry] and delay damages us very much, because we need to be able to organize our event before summer,” he said recently. 

“Now we won’t be able to organize qualitative competitions, since most of the people we’ve invited will be busy by the time our postponed activities finally take place,” Filipi added. 

Organizers of international festivals in Albania say public funding is crucial to their survival because private businesses have little or no interest in investing in culture. 

Albania Dace Meeting 2009 | Courtesy of International Festival of Modern and Contemporary Dance

Responding to the concerns of festival directors, the culture ministry in a recent statement explained it could do little to fund art events before the new Center for Arts came into place.

“The delay is the result of internal reforms in the ministry,” Nikolla Lena, the ministry’s director of cultural policies, explained. 

“We are creating a new institution, the Center for Arts and Culture, which will have the competences to select applications for fund-raising, and festival staff have to deal with this new institution,” he added. 

Some local observers of the cultural scene believe the installment of the Center for Arts has not been realized because the ministry emptied this year’s budget on ad hoc events staged during the election campaign to boost the image of the ruling Democratic Party. 

“Many cultural events were held during the election, such as concerts where famous pop musicians took part,” said a professor of dramaturgy at the Academy of Arts in Tirana, who asked to remain anonymous.  

“These were very expensive and were not planned in the annual budget for culture,” he added. 

Nertian Licaj a well-known actor at the national theater in Tirana agreed. “The election campaign strongly affected the budgets of cultural institutions in Albania,” Licaj said, noting that this underlined the absence of “structured cultural policies” in Albania.   

Festival director Filipi fears that without such policies in place, cultural events that have grown to maturity will suffer more in coming years. 

“Festivals that don’t get sufficient funding will be forced to lower their quality,” he warned.  
“The time has come for the arts to be supported with adequate cultural policies and financial resources,” Filipi added.

This article is funded under the BICCED project, supported by the Swiss Cultural Programme.