A great initiative from the Spoffin Festival in Amersfoort, Netherlands which invited street theatre artists to vote on their best festival in Europe this year.  Watch this space for the announcement of the winners!

Artists are constantly judged by festival audiences and organizations. Are they good, innovative, fun enough to be invited to perform? Are they worth a good round of applause? Festival Spoffin turns things around and organises the Festival of the Year 2011, in cooperation with Amersfoort Theater Terras and De Tuin der Lusten. Finally, artists are given the vote! They can give their opinion about more than a hundred European festivals, based on 6 criteria.

The results will be presented on Friday, August 26th at the opening of Spoffin 2011. The directors of the three award winning festivals get an invitation to attend Spoffin 2012. The festival will provide their transport costs, hotel, meals and tickets.

Here are the criteria - useful to know for festival organisers and funders!

What makes an artist perform at 110%? Which festival provides just that? Finally, artists are given the vote! (But let’s not take this too serious.) Artists can give their opinion on 6 criteria:

1. Audience
   How are the crowds? Big audiences, attentive audiences, polite, silent, enthousiastic.


2. Performance venue
   Is there any care about the venue where you perform? Are you well placed?


3. Productional & technical support
   Do you get what is in your technical rider? How is the communication about production and technics?


4. Hotel
   Does the festival provide a good place to spend the night?


5. Food
   How is the quality of the meals? Does the festival provide junk food or performance food?


6. Payment
   Are you well paid and in time?

The Festival of the Year 2011 Awards

The results of the Festival of the Year 2011 Contest will be presented on Friday, August 26th at the opening of Spoffin 2011. The directors of the three award winning festivals get an invitation to attend Spoffin 2012. The festival will provide their transport costs, hotel, meals and tickets.

[caption id="attachment_14241" align="aligncenter" width="590" caption="ORKESTAR STRADA [Finland"] - PHOTO: ORKESTAR STRADA "][/caption]The Rules

• Only artists can vote.


• To prevent neighbours and nephews of festival organizers pretending to be artists, you can only vote after you have been given a code. We start by giving a code to all artists we know. Artists can invite their colleagues. Artists can apply themselves via this website.


• We will never share, publish or talk about the personal votes of an artist.


• We will only publish overall data.


• Artists can only vote for festivals where they performed in 2010. Let’s keep it an annual thing. Festivals might improve! If this is fun, we’ll do it again next year.


• Artists can judge 5 different festivals. Just to prevent our team from an overload of work. At some festivals a lot of artists go, so, please, judge a festival if you see that there’s few votes on it.


• Festival Spoffin, Amersfoorts Theater Terras and De Tuin der Lusten are not in competition, as their organisers are close connected the creators of this poll.


• We pre-selected 100 festivals in Europe. Artists can suggest festivals to be added to the list.