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By Ben Vardy, Festival Artistic Director
The bespoke primary school festival at the International School of Geneva (Ecolint) took place in March of this year, in celebration of the school’s centenary. The event involved every primary student in the school from Year 3 through to Year 6, participating in a full timetable Arts Week: a glorious week of nothing but arts and creativity, bursting out of every door and window in the school.
This was an enormous operation, and the largest bespoke festival ISTA had ever put together – participating were:
• 280 students
• 11 artists (creating work across Film, Musical Theatre, Clowning, Devising, Puppetry, Mask, Theatre Tech, Visual Arts and Dance.)
• 40 Ecolint teachers working creatively with the artists and students
• And a huge number of other members of staff from across the school community, helping to make the festival possible, and bringing everything together.
Throughout the week, the whole school campus felt like a bustling hive of creative energy: Dance battles raged in cleared-out classrooms, student film crews huddled round cameras in playgrounds, performance sharings took place on sunlit mezzanines, singing rehearsals, mural-painting, mask-making, fashion shows – whichever way you turned there were young people avidly engaged in some sort of creative pursuit or other.
Sometimes they were working on their own – their brow furrowed in concentration as they carefully added some green-painted trimming to the edge of the surrealist mask they’d just made; sometimes in pairs using fond memories of holidays to create their own original choreography; sometimes in larger groups storyboarding the scene they were going to film together the next day.
This was less a festival, more a village, or rather a whole small town, populated with hundreds of young people, getting more and more excited each day about the thrill of collective creativity.
The festival was part of Ecolint’s centenary celebrations. The world’s oldest international school turned 100 years old in 2024, and this festival was one joyous part of their extensive centenary celebrations. We decided to use the centenary as inspiration for the work we created with the students: What still connects us to those students and staff from 100 years ago? What has remained the same? What has changed? What would you say to them, or ask them, if you had the chance to meet them? Who else might we encounter in our travels across time?
After several days exploring these themes separately in their groups, the students came together on the final day to combine their creations into one enormous, multifaceted promenade performance. The sharing started with the audience witnessing a single, bored-looking child sitting restlessly on the floor, as an old grandfather clock ticked inexorably on in the background. Suddenly, the child notices a small, antique wooden box they’d never seen before, and out of sheer boredom and curiosity, they decide to open it.
From out of this creaky little box, flood countless historic characters and stories, myriad mysterious creatures from across the last 100 years – time-keepers, time-travellers, artists and clowns, dancers and puppets – all manner of strange and surprising figures emerged from this magical time-warping box.
The student performers then drew the audience across the school, weaving together their various art forms in a variety of performance spaces both indoors and outdoors. The audience could hardly believe their eyes: hundreds of children proudly sharing a continuously overflowing cornucopia of creativity and play – here a masked fashion show, there an 80’s playground dance, on the screen a comedic film about a disappearing eraser, then suddenly a train filled with puppets takes us back to the 1920’s. The audience was left speechless at the sheer scale and variety of what the young people had created, and raucously applauded at the end of each piece.
It was such a joy to witness the laughter, excitement, focus and creative courage of these student artists throughout the festival. I’m deeply proud of how fully they committed themselves to the creative process, the beautiful performances they put together on the final day, and of the exceptionally talented artists who guided them along their paths. I was also incredibly impressed by the tireless hard work, ambition and exuberance of Francesca Buttle and the rest of her team at Ecolint, without whom this festival would never have even been dreamed up, let alone come together in such a huge and spectacular way.
This festival was a gargantuan undertaking and an enormous success, with hundreds of students discovering a potentially lifelong love of communal creativity. Now that it’s all over, I think it’s important for us to remind ourselves that every ending can also be viewed as a beginning, as we said to students on the final day of the festival:
Don’t think of today as the last day of Arts Week, but rather as the first day of Arts Life.
