Preserving a special sense of meaning is pivotal for Jane Moss. “There are lots of festivals around. You need to stay focused on a festival that has meaning of some sort.” She has found that the most successful performing arts events “always have enormous passion attached. For a festival, you need somebody who is an advocate and who is passionate about what they are presenting. Audiences do not want programming based on a focus group. They tend to respond to vision. If you start with the premise: ‘We want an audience of XX and therefore will do YY, because we think we know what they will like’, it almost never works. The audience will respond to a director who has passion.”