Festivals, Why, What, When, A case study of Berlin

The focus for this chapter is a reflection on the relevance and role of festivals in contemporary life. It is prompted by reading nearly one hundred applications from young festival managers who were applying to participate in a professional Atelier organised by the European Festivals Association. What became very clear from this exercise was the importance of reflection on why we invest so much energy into festivals. The applicants’ submissions also prompted me to consider ‘Who are we doing this for?’ and more fundamentally to think about how to create, develop or sustain a festival in 2013. This reflection is not aimed at, nor does it discuss or question the existence of traditional big events, such as Salzburg, Bayreuth, Edinburgh or Avignon. Their continued existence (for the foreseeable future) may be more or less taken for granted. Due to their cultural weight and longevity they have developed as important touristic events and, in this respect therefore, they are atypical and not central to the focus of this debate on festivals today.

Festivals of Transition, Greenlight Festival Leicester

The Brundtland Commission in its report Our Common Future (United Nations, 1987) is widely credited with setting down the first policy definition of sustainable development. In 2017 this report will be thirty years old yet it seems we are still a long way from living sustainably: If, as of 2017, there is not a start of a major wave of new and clean investments, the door to 2 degrees [global temperature increase] will be closed. (Birol, 2011) Green policies have been ‘adapted and adopted’ by mainstream parties across Europe, despite Green parties being a relatively small political force (Carter, 2013). The European Commission has become a worldwide driver of green policy (Judge, 1992) and market-based innovations such as the Emissions Trading System 1 , despite being celebrated and criticised in seemingly equal measure. Media coverage of ‘outsider’ party growth in the UK has swung towards the libertarian and anti-Europe UKIP recently, despite comparable and longer term growth in support for the Greens (Goodwin & Ford, 2013). Efforts have been made to disassociate Green voices from older clichés of self-deprivation: The Green party has changed: partly the personalities within it, partly in response to the changing world outside it....At the same time, ideas that were mainly theoretical 25 years ago – solar and wind technology – have been demonstrably workable...The Greens have become the party of possibilities, not catastrophes. (Williams, 2014). One attempt to imagine a sustainable future can be found in The World We Made, written by Johnathon Porritt from the perspective of a school teacher in the year 2050. The positives of huge renewable investments, progressive economic policies and a panoply of exciting new technologies are matched with equally plausible negatives of stubborn inequality, famines and riots. In the postscript, Porritt states: ‘If we can’t deliver the necessarily limited vision of a better world mapped out in The World We Made, then the hard truth is that no other vision will be available to us anyway, on any terms.’ (Porritt, 2013: 276)

Diaspora Community Festivals and Tourism

Festivals that celebrate the identities, cultures and traditions of diverse minority, ethnic, diaspora communities are significant cultural and social phenomena. They may also contribute to the visitor economy, for example through increasing tourism income, government revenue and employment (Maclinchey, 2008; O’Sullivan and Jackson, 2002; Picard and Robinson, 2006). Furthermore, diaspora community festivals may contribute to enriching the development of place-images and destination marketing themes that seek to reflect diversity and promote a ‘globalised’ image of the population of the area (usually city) where such festivals take place (Paradis, 2002). As a consequence, ‘festival tourism’ has entered the language of tourism studies, defined as “a phenomenon in which people from outside a festival locale visit during the festival period” (O’Sullivan and Jackson, 2002: 325). This chapter contributes to festival tourism studies by exploring Chinese New Year festivals in the UK and their emerging prominence as tourism attractions. Research in this area examines its potential for building bridges between communities and cultures. Some scholars problematise the term ‘festival tourism’ and resist defining it as a particular category of the tourism market. For example, Quinn (2009) refuses to employ this term, arguing that the primary purpose of festivals is not usually the generation of tourism. Some contemporary festivals do possess a strong place-marketing or tourism objective as part of their rationale. However, many ‘traditional festivals’ that celebrate community beliefs, social values and identities do not have tourism as a primary purpose (though this may be a significant secondary outcome). Examples include festivities associated with belief systems and annual cultural events such as those associated with the Chinese New Year (Bakhtin, 1984; Humphrey, 2001; Magliocco, 2006). Although these festivals have changed in their form over time and some of them may have associations with tourism, they cannot be equated with events that are planned primarily for tourism.

The Public Festival: Inspiration and interconnectivity at the heart of festivals

Festivals have been around, and will always be around; no matter the political context they are embedded in, supported by, or hindered by. Why? Simply because society develops, it transforms, it is dynamic and it needs space for reflection and inspiration. Festivals are platforms for people to meet, and for artists to present their work, their creations. This gives festivals an enduring, quite independent mission and reason to exist: as long as festivals strive to offer a biotope for artists and audiences alike and point to questions which concern the way we live and want to live, they will be a fertile ground for a meaningful development of society – and an offer for serving the public wellbeing. What are the challenges festivals are facing today? There are a series of very complex questions related to festivals’ positioning us as human beings in an interconnected, global society, our relation to nature and the immediate surroundings, our stories of life so that as many citizens as possible can be part of the societal discourse, can be enriched, can be touched, can be heard, can be moved. Individuals, interest groups, nationalities, countries, even continents are interconnected. What does this mean for a festival? Travelling across Europe for work and pleasure and meeting citizens from all walks of life has taught me that citizens, a term that connects individuals to some larger constructed community, are just people, everyday people, going about their lives. People connect with other humans and their human stories, real life encounters. Abstract theory and jargon are meaningless when they lack real life connections. Meaningful festivals of the future will offer possibilities for new connections among people: they invite people to travel in time and in space; they inspire to connect human stories, enriching them with new, unexpected, colourful stories!

Festivalisation: Patterns and Limits

The rapid development of arts festivals in the past quarter century should not make us forget that such festivals are a relatively new phenomenon in Europe and that their current explosion goes hand in hand with a growing differentiation in the events/festivals market (Klaić 2008). Notwithstanding the long history of major events, the social, economic and cultural phenomenon that we associate with the ‘festivalisation of culture’ is much more recent. It is also linked to a plurality of causes, such as the evolution of democratic regimes (notably in Southern Europe), or the decentralisation of power in France (Négrier and Jourda 2007).

The Future of European Festivals

Even if we sometimes trace the word ‘festival’ back to its ancient root (calling to mind the traditional events of Bayreuth, Orange and Verona), the idea of the arts festival as we know it is relatively recent. The modern festival has evolved as part of the ‘leisure society’, with its extended summer holidays and its all-pervasive media. The theatre festival in Avignon, the oldest and best known of all the French festivals, was founded in 1947 by actor and director Jean Vilar. Yet Vilar would never have imagined the success and geographical expansion that the future would bring to the festival phenomenon. For him, the festival was just another one of the many methods he used to bring young people together to share his aesthetic and moral values. Immediately after World War Two, festivals sprang up simultaneously in several countries. At the same time as Avignon and Aix-en-Provence were started in France, similar events in Edinburgh and Recklinghausen were born. This synchronicity implies that the festival is both a social and a historical phenomenon, one both rooted in and responding to the spirit of the times and to our consumer society.

Festival Leadership in Turbulent Times

Europe is undergoing a period of transformational political change, with the post-war centre-left consensus that dominated the western nations breaking down and being replaced by a neo-liberal belief in the importance of markets in service delivery and a corresponding reduction in state intervention. Combine this with the financial crisis, which has meant cuts to arts and culture budgets in the UK, Netherlands, Italy, Greece and Hungary amongst others. Add in a touch of technologically driven change and then stop to consider the political, economic and social changes arising from the Arab Spring and the growing economic strength of Russia, Turkey and Kazakhstan on Europe’s borders. There are opportunities and threats for all arts and cultural organisations, but what does this mean for festivals’ leaders in particular? What do they see as the main issues? How are these issues affecting their vision, production and programming polices, their staff, funding, audience development and stakeholder relationships? In times of great turbulence, leaders are the pathfinders who establish new ways of working. In Europe the auteur tradition has placed artistic leadership at the centre of decision-making, both within festivals themselves and amongst funders. Festivals’ artistic directors are often independent cultural intermediaries, standing apart from the establishment but commenting on it; influencing both their own organisations and wider debates about legitimacy and value (Smith Maguire and Matthews, 2012). This is combined with the tendency of festival organisations to be quite small and entrepreneurial, operating what Handy (1999) calls ‘power cultures’, reliant on a central figure with a strong vision to make decisions. At their best, with visionary leaders, such organisations can create strong, supportive cultures that are flexible and that can react quickly to social, political and economic change. How then are these weather vanes responding to the post 2008 turbulent social and economic times in Europe?

Festivals, Urbanity and the Public Sphere, reflections on European festivals

“What is a festival?” is a deceptively simple question – but also a deceptively complex one. This is reflected by much of the literature on festivals, in which discussion of their multiplicity and heterogeneity, their complex etymologies and histories, as well as the expansion in the second half of the 20th century, and exponentially since the 1980s in Europe, has seen festivals transformed into one of the dominant formats in the current cultural realm. However, beneath the apparent multiplicity, one major feature helps to clarify the issues at stake when considering their cultural significance: festivals tend to be either “‘traditional’ moments of celebration or... highly orchestrated mega-events” (Waitt, 2008: 513). The first are supposed to be the organic expression of a community; the second, which we may call post-traditional (Giorgi and Sassatelli, 2011: 1-11), are instead mostly associated with the contemporary culture industry and its rationales, their recent exponential growth seen as proof that we are faced by a non-organic, commercially driven phenomenon. The distinction is relevant because, whilst traditional festivals have been studied, in particular within anthropology and folklore studies, as expressions of a given society and an entry point into its culture, values and identity, post-traditional festivals have been dismissed by some writers as banal, and banalizing ‘spectacles’ (Debord, 1994). Different approaches and literatures contribute to deepen this gulf, with contemporary festivals on the whole dismissed by mainstream social science and cultural theory and assessed in terms of their (economic) impact only. In this chapter, after a brief review of the dominant approach in urban festivals research, I try to uncouple these associations. That is, to explore the possibility that contemporary festivals, as expressions of the contemporary society in which they flourish, can provide a valuable analytical perspective on its public culture.

A View from Australia

Dragan Klaić’s faith in festivals as a uniting cultural force seems to have had much in common with the altruistic beginnings of the Edinburgh Festival. While it is true that post-war Edinburgh desperately needed new economic drivers, there is no reason to doubt the founders’ desires for a cultural framework that might help to pull Europe together again. Klaić’s desire was to deconstruct the silos of national identity and construct in their place platforms on which the differences in language and practice could be better understood and shared. While Melina Mercuri’s desires for better understanding between the different cultures of Europe resulted in many positive collaborations and much-needed sources of mobility for artists through the European Capital of Culture programme, the programme has also bred a kind of necessary civic bragging that I doubt Klaić would have found productive. This account of international arts festivals in Australia is less one of bragging (though that too has had its place) and more one of early ignorance, gradual evolution and a happy present. International arts festivals in Australia were first built entirely on the Edinburgh model. When first Perth in Western Australia, and then Adelaide in South Australia, cloned that model to their relatively isolated cities, the core desire was to bring ‘culture’ to those cities. Not that Perth and Adelaide lacked artists and performances, but those who had been to Edinburgh felt that Australian audiences were rarely exposed to the ‘best’ of culture. The significantly named Elizabethan Theatre Trust and entrepreneurs such as Ken Brodziak, already toured international shows and artists: I myself was taken by our science teacher, along with a few fellow students, to see Vivien Leigh play Portia in The Merchant of Venice, in 1962.

Mela in the UK: A ‘travelled and habituated’ festival

Mela in the United Kingdom has become, in its short thirty year history, one of the most popular forms of festival entertainment. The word ‘mela’ itself, is based on the Sanskrit, meaning a community gathering or meeting, and in its many forms mela in the UK has remained true to this broad sense of people, families and communities congregating together in an atmosphere of festivity. At its roots, mela in the UK has evolved out of South Asian religious rites and rituals, and can also be seen to be built on South Asian folk and rural culture and traditions. However, at the core of the definition of mela is the notion of a gathering. This is most appropriate here in that it does not necessarily refer to any mono-cultural or religious focus, and is important when we observe how mela has ‘travelled’ and become ‘habituated’ in the UK. Carnegie and Smith (2006) identify Edinburgh Mela as having travelled but in this chapter, whilst recognising the travelled nature of mela that they refer to, we indicate that it is the habituated nature of mela that more clearly identifies its nature and existence in the UK. Therefore, this chapter will document that, after 25 to 30 years, mela in the UK can be seen to be adopting its own traditions and connotations. Moreover, by the very nature of the modern diverse British population, mela is now largely urbanised and many continue to reflect South Asian religious festivals, be they Boishakhi Melas (Brick Lane London), Holi Hai Melas (Oxford) or Eid Melas (Birmingham), but others have lost touch with these roots as the demands of festival and cultural event management and venue availability have led to other requirements taking priority. The focus of the research presented here is concerned with the manifestation of mela in the UK and, in particular, how it has adapted to the various town and city locations in which it is now a fundamental part of the cultural events calendar. The importance of mela in terms of economic impact and tourism may be one reason why mela is popular with local authorities.