With solipsistic certainty — it exists because I say so — the Jeddah Festival is with us again. In an explosion of light and sound, it burst out onto the shores of Obhur Creek the best part of two weeks ago. Long lines of dancers undulated in a slightly bemused fashion, and almost entirely in step, through the smoke and lasers of the spectacular.
When the smoke had cleared by the following morning, so it seems had all traces of the festival.
Pictures appeared in newspapers and long lists of events were announced, the first arriving at Arab News some three days later. Inquiries as to whether these events were actually going to take place — based on our experience of last year where much of what was advertised never happened — and requests for more details met with a response from one of the staff in the organizing office that left the female reporter in tears.
Crowds line the Corniche each night; a few lights have been strung out to brighten the place up; but where exactly is the festival? Has anyone seen it?
Visits to centers advertised on the photocopied handout we received have revealed little more than a few extra plastic toys and not a lot else. Nothing in the downtown area catches the eye in the way of “festival fever.” It all looks pretty much the same.
Inquiries at two major hotels showed that there was an increase in bookings, mainly from Indonesia and Malaysia, and those were for Umrah tours.
The mirage of the festival — now you see it, now you don’t — resonates with the kind of planning that builds a shopping mall in response to the customers you are sure it will get. It accounts for shopping centers looking like tombs of dead enterprise, and the transparent, nay invisible, festival spirit running through the streets of Jeddah.
A quarter of a century of the Jeddah Festival might just have brought this geriatric event to its last gasp. The repeat, year after year of the same non-event, does not make it new. It simply makes it repetitive.
Time perhaps for a re-think. Perhaps start with asking a few questions of the people who you want to come, the target market. What do they want out of a festival, why come to Jeddah when for the same price they could go to Dubai or almost anywhere in southern Europe? What makes Jeddah special and what is its unique selling point? Just because it is advertised as a festival doesn’t mean it is one.
