Jonathan Mills: International man

For all of Jonathan Mills’s artistic credentials you can’t fault his much more prosaic knack for salesmanship. “You will get sunburnt!” he warns, “even in the damp climate of Edinburgh this August.”

“These shows are damned hot. The heat that radiates off them is as sexy as we can get!”

It’s this year’s theme—loosely speaking, “an exploration of certain relations between North-South-Central America”—which, Mills insists, has lent the 2010 programme its decidedly sultry edge: “I didn’t go about trying to find a sexy festival. I think we came up with a sexy theme and the rest was inevitable.”

It’s a theme which, he admits, is much harder to define than in previous years: “The year before it was artists without borders – that’s easy. Last year it it was very much about a kind of intellectual bent. This year… it’s a texture; it’s a timbre; it’s a look; it’s a colour.” He slaps a copy of the garish programme. “It’s a different shade and intensity of light.”

Whatever else it is, it’s an extraordinarily diverse programme. Opening with John Adams’s opera El Niño, it includes Brazilian dance troupe, Crupo Corpo (“a very sexy bunch of dancers – the bumps are all in the right places!”) and Australian Opera’s Bliss (“not quite Little Britain meets opera, but still savagely funny”), closing with the usual opulent firework display – set this year to Bernstein.

The programme sees Bolivian monks rub shoulders with San Fransiscan dancers and is, one suspects, not a little inspired by Mills’s own experience as a non-European artist: “If all we do is sit in our nice, manicured townhouses in Edinburgh and contemplate how marvellous European civilisation has been for the last couple of hundred years we’re not going to learn anything,” he says.

Much like 2008’s Artists Without Borders then, there’s an unmistakable political edge to what Mills is doing: “We live in a world of shrinking resources and increasing population. So it’s about asking a very different question to begin with, and that question for me, generally, is outside the arts. Its an arts festival, but it needs to be bigger than all of us.”

Weighty stuff for the man one commentator notoriously wrote off as a “minnow” following his surprise appointment as EIF director in 2006. But the Australian has more than settled into his stride since then. He’s not afraid to set about some sacred cows, either – not least the long held idealisation of the EIF as the highbrow older brother of the edgier Fringe. “You revert too much to clichés in this country,” asserts Mills. “And the clichés are wrong, actually.”

“It’s really very important for people in the Fringe to say to the ladies of Morningside that there are some things that they might actually enjoy. And it’s also very important for us to say to people who might more identify with the Fringe audience that there’s quite interesting, experimental, edgy work in what we do.”

And, of course, sexy work, too. Front and centre of this year’s programme are shows chosen with a “friendly, hip, interesting” audience in mind, from Lemi Ponifasio’s Birds with Skymirrors—a beautiful work about the environmental degradation of the Pacific which “every young person in Edinburgh should see”—or the Gospel at Colonus, a soul retelling of Oedipus, starring the Blind Boys of Alabama. Inevitably, Mills has has to counter accusations of going downmarket.

“I haven’t chosen it because it’s accessible, and I haven’t chosen it because it’s not. I don’t go around saying, ‘what’s esoteric that I can shove in the programme’ or ‘what’s populist’. I’ve done something different: I’ve said ‘what’s the big idea that we can all follow?’”

But, I press, there's surely something deliberately provocative in a programme which so clearly stamps an attempt to “move the festival away from being an international festival just doing European work."

Mills grins: “I promise you, I’m not sitting down thinking of the ladies of Morningside and how offended they may or may not be by anything I’m putting in or not.

“I’m trying to do something much more basic and think: ‘what kind of world do I live in; what kind of experiences do I want to be part of; what sort of experiences have I travelled the world to see that I desperately want people in Edinburgh to share.”