Dubai Speed's translation to English

In early 2007, writer and theatre director Michael Schindhelm was appointed by the Dubai authorities as consultant on a projected opera house, and in early 2008 found himself with a broader remit as director of the newly founded Dubai Culture and Arts Authority. His diary of 2008 is a partly fictionalized account of his first twelve months of both working and living in Dubai. It is a meditation, from a cultural perspective, on the nature of this extraordinary city and its project to reinvent itself according to new rules of its own devising.

From the outset there were profound cultural issues to be faced. Can essentially alien art forms be transplanted effectively? Can they be imposed top-down by the authorities? Can high culture ever be financially self-supporting? In a society run like a business by a tiny, unaccountable elite, in which freedom of speech is limited and 90 percent of the inhabitants are transient, expendable expatriates, can the arts realistically be nurtured as a form of social expression and self-examination?

The author’s efforts to create projects were undermined by misunderstandings over the nature and purpose of the arts – in his employers’ conception, little more than a marketing tool to boost Dubai’s brand as a premier global tourist resort. His woes were compounded by the lack of clear distinction between government and private enterprise, and by the very Arabian custom of bringing in privileged outsiders to advise on, and occasionally to compete with, schemes supposedly under his direction. Ultimately, his projects were undone by the global financial crash of late 2008.

Despite such travails, the author is able to see the funny side and retains some sympathy for the Dubai project. He remains optimistic, seeing in Dubai and other Gulf States a glimmer of hope for international cultural dialogue, leading to increased understanding between the Arab world and the West.

The author and photographer

In 2005 Michael Schindhelm was appointed executive director of the newly founded Stiftung Oper in Berlin, the world’s largest opera group, comprising the Staatsoper Berlin, Deutsche Oper and Komische Oper. In 2007 he left to advise the government of Dubai on setting up an opera house and other cultural facilities. He has also written novels and screenplays, and made documentaries for television.

Aurore Belkin is an award-winning French-Canadian photographer based in Dubai and Rome.

 “Michael Schindhelm – Allah’s impresario.”
Matthias Geyer, Der Spiegel, March 2008

  “A unique insider’s memoir of the grandiose – and all too fleeting – attempt to use state power to reinvent a culture.”
Michael Z. Wise, Foreign Policy, March/April 2010

  “Dubai High is that very rare thing: an honest account of a failure. This unsparing memoir of twelve months spent creating Dubai’s cultural authority, in a climate of mingled idealism and opportunism, intimately describes the complexities of working in an epicentre of globalization. It offers a dry but sympathetic view of Dubai’s bewildered Emiratis as they construct, or have constructed for them, a unique 21st-century urban prototype. It is a record not only of how the writer tried to change Dubai, but of how Dubai changed the writer.”
Rem Koolhaas, December 2010