Edinburgh festival looks at rapidly changing Europe

By Ian MacKenzie

EDINBURGH (Reuters Life!) - This year's Edinburgh International Festival, the world's biggest annual arts extravaganza, explores the changing face of Europe with a programme of music, theatre and dance called "artists without borders".

The festival's Australian director Jonathan Mills noted that it was founded in 1947 in the aftermath of World War Two as an optimistic expression of what might be.

Europe in the early 21st century was a very different place, he said in announcing this year's programme on Wednesday.

"Political borders have been redrawn in every direction one cares to look. These borders are not just political or geographic but, more significantly, represent a profound shift of cultural, social and even religious identity and opportunity."

The festival opens on Aug. 8 with "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny", a tragic-comic satire of a hedonistic city where anything goes by Bertolt Brecht to the music of Kurt Weill.

The festival runs through 151 different events to the final fireworks display erupting over Edinburgh castle on Aug. 31.

"The Europe we know today is fundamentally different from the Europe of 2004; the Europe of 2004 is radically different from the Europe of 1989," said Mills, who directed his first Edinburgh international festival last year.

"Who would have thought, in the shadow of the fall of the Berlin Wall, that Poland would be part of the European Union today, that Kosovo would have declared independence, and that Czechoslovakia would have cleaved itself in two, not just a velvet revolution but a velvet divorce?