Festivals in the Pandemic

Abstract

2022 marks the 75th anniversary of the two foundational post-war destination festivals of Edinburgh and Avignon. It is also 75 years since eight Scottish theatre companies turned up uninvited to Edinburgh’s festival to protest a lack of local representation in the programme, thus initiating the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Since that time, international arts festivals have become a global phenomenon championed for their socio-economic impacts and promoted within city branding and tourism campaigns. Festivalisation strategies by local authorities have led to the proliferation of these events worldwide, but have also been resisted for their role in securitising, privatising, and blocking access to public space. Festivals must respond to the needs and priorities of their local communities while also fostering discussions within the live performance community at an international level. These events represent a diversity of locations, size, duration, and histories; are informed by their own values, rationales, and mandates; and reflect different models, organisational structures, and funding arrangements, but all place-based festivals seek to bring performers and audiences together in a shared space and many seek to do so for short intense periods. With this very raison d’être threatened by the global health pandemic, festival bodies have had to reconsider and re-evaluate their core purpose. The context has changed since the onset of the pandemic – not just as a result of COVID-19 and necessary health measures – but due to a renewed focus on diversity and inclusion, accessibility, and environmental sustainability. It has been almost 20 years since Contemporary Theatre Review’s last special issue on Festivals in 2003, edited by David Bradby and Maria M. Delgado. They began their editorial with the observation that, at the time, ‘The social, cultural and economic role that festivals have played in contemporary culture remains largely unexplored territory’. Since then, this gap has largely been redressed by a burgeoning sub-discipline of festival studies that has emerged. Much of this work has been informed by a cultural materialist lens first set out by Ric Knowles’s article on the ‘Edinburgh Festival and Fringe’ for Canadian Theatre Review but later expanded on within Reading the Material Theatre. Jen Harvie, too, has interrogated the cultural work of the Edinburgh festivals, particularly following developments on the Fringe, from commercialisation and Disneyification to the rise of the artepreneur. There have been studies of regional festival circuits, such as Christina McMahon’s focus on the 1. Bernadette Quinn, ‘Arts Festivals, Urban Tourism and Cultural Policy’, Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events 2, no. 3 (2010): 264–79, https://doi. org/10.1080/ 19407963.2010. 512207. 2. Andrew Smith, Events in the City: Using Public Spaces as Event Venues (London: Routledge, 2015).