A radical rethink of how the world's most prestigious arts festival is marketed is being launched as an experiment by its new director.
Fergus Linehan, in his first year as artistic director of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), said the Festival is trialling new ways of launching its programme, as it announced that tickets for one of its major theatrical shows of next August, Antigone, starring Juliette Binoche, will go on sale later this month.
Next year, instead of one major programme launch for the entire Festival in March, its classical music concerts at the Usher Hall, Queen's Hall and another venue, yet to be named, will be separately launched in February, with tickets put on sale a month before the rest of the programme.
Mr Linehan, who has already moved the dates of the EIF to August 9 to 22, aligning it with the Fringe and other festivals in August, said the changes were a toe in the water.
He said that all classical music tickets sold after the February launch were transferable, so that if ticket buyers wanted to change their plans after the March launch, they could.
Tickets for Antigone are to go on sale on November 29.
Celebrated stage and screen actress Binoche plays Antigone in a contemporary version of Sophocles's tragedy, newly translated by award-winning poet Anne Carson and directed by one of the world's leading theatre directors, Ivo van Hove. It will run from August 9 to 22 at Edinburgh's King's Theatre.
Mr Linehan said: "We were sitting down in August and September this year and we realised the list of programming for the Usher Hall and the Queen's Hall was almost done and the elements were all pulled together - and I thought, we can either sit on it for five months or we can share it with the public.
"It is testing the water, and truthfully we could have released the programme before Christmas.
"There are people who come to the Festival who just go to the music, but there is a huge cross-over to the other artforms too. We are not seeing them as separate audiences.
"At the same time there could be reasons to pull the launch back even further in the future for the benefit of international audiences."
Mr Linehan added that the musical launch in February would not include his contemporary or traditional music programming.
He said Antigone would be seen as a centrepiece of next year's EIF and added: "This is part of an effort to release information to the public as early as possible to assist them in planning their summer visits to Edinburgh and Scotland."
On Antigone, the director Ivo Van Hove said: "While searching for a play for our first collaboration, Juliette and I very quickly agreed that Antigone would be the right artistic challenge for both of us.
"The play itself has the explosiveness of a nuclear bomb ... it deals with all possible relationships: man against woman, political against ethical leadership, the laws of society against the right of the individual, family and its unbreakable blood ties. Antigone should resonate with everyone the world over."
The play receives its premiere in Luxembourg in February.
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