Festival notes: March 27th, 2012-03-28 Block I Festival as direct communication/ a direct cultural encounter: How festivals negotiate

and communicate collective identities? How do they foster political opinions? How do they impact community building? How they figure as means of critical intervention? How they perform places? Since the end of the Cold War there has been a tremendous proliferation of festivals in
Europe. No one can say how many festivals exist in Europe today. 2000? 3000? Probably more. With this quantity, the unique profile of many festivals has become blurred and the conceptual orientation less transparent. What a festival program must contain in order to earn artistic approval, what prestige it must acquire or sustain, how many visitors it must get, how much of the budget has to come from sponsorship, how many jobs, reviews, newspaper write ups and radio and television minutes of coverage it must generate... becomes a matter of unrealistic expectations, controversy and quantity-obsessed debate. In a festival world and around cynics abound; festivals are easy to criticize and easier to gossip about. So festivals get overshadowed by their own mythology or pitted against the successes of another festival. Compared disparagingly with the proliferating theme parks. Classified in statistics with the congresses industry or trade shows. Unfairly measured up by the yardstick of visual arts biennials and film festivals, whose commercial interests behind all the glamour the performing arts festivals simply cannot contain. (Dragan Klaic, The Future of Festivals) Factors that frame contemporary festivals in Europe and around the world: migration, cultural globalization, erosion of distinction between high-brow and low brow culture, etc.

How festivals generate meaning?

Festivals as collective effervescence (Dukrheim 1912) = channels for expressing and consolidating as sense of community (i.e. from Ancient Athens to festivals of the French Revolution)

Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere

Locating arts festivals as instances of the cultural public sphere: What is public sphere? For Habermas, it is a mediating instance between public and private authorities through the vehicle of public opinion. An emancipated public sphere was a goal, where the validity of every political consequence be made dependant on a consensus arrived at in communication free from domination. The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatised but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: peoples public use of their reason. (Habemas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 27) When Habermas wrote about the public sphere as a concept, he intended to designate a zone of mediation between state and individuals where individuals could come together to engage in reasoned argument over key issues of mutual interest and concern, creating a space in which new ideas and the practice and discipline of rational public debate were cultivated. These sites were the emerging a associational spaces such as coffee houses, clubs, newspapers, theatre and arts, and art criticism. (Janelle Reinelt Rethinking the Public Sphere for a Global Age) Reinelt critiques Habermass idealism (and often oversight) when it comes to issues of inclusion/ exclusion; class, gender, etc. What is the relationship between a communicational form such as print and its socio-political context? What kinds of popular participation are made possible in a given context of publicity, and whose interests are best represented in a particular public sphere? (Arvind Rajagoptal Introduction in The Indian Public Sphere: Readings in media history) View I: Positive reality of festivals along the lines of Habermas in terms of communicative action as opportunity to realise discourse about public goods View II: A more critical stance of Bourdieu which emphasises structure and the means of drawing and reproducing distinctions within societies. Between the beginning of the century, with poetry, and the 1880s with theatre, there develops at the heart of each genre a more autonomous sector or, if you will, an avant-garde. Each of the genres tends to cleave into a research sector and a commercial sector, two markets between which one must be wary of establishing a clear boundary, since they are merely two poles, defined in and by their antagonistic relationship, of the same space. (P. Bourdieu The Rules of Art, 1995) Habermas, Adorno, Horcheimer also worried about decline of public sphere with commercialisation

1. (relating to Habermas) How ideas, beliefs and norms inform festival organisation? How these aspects create and influence content and bring fourth effervescent experience? 2. (relating to Bourdieu) How are these contents (often idealistic) embodied in the real world of industrial power relations, networks and scarce resources? The latter acts as constraining factor limiting the scope and outreach of content and determining what can and cannot be realized. Block II: The Public Sphere of Literary Festivals What do literary festivals and Habermass notion of cultural public sphere have in common? The both emerged from literary salons of 18 and 19 century mainly in Paris and London. Contemporary literary festivals are, of course, not the direct descendants of the earlier literary salon, but they serve similar functions in that they are often established explicitly for promoting the exchange of ideas and to link arts and politics. (Liana Giorgi Between tradition, vision and imagination) The first literary festival of the 20th century was the Cheltenham Literary Festival (1949) Our case studies: Hay-on-Wye festival (1988) The Berlin Literary Festival (2001) The Borderlines Festival (focuses on Eastern Europe; takes place in different border city every year) Space: no longer a salon, but local council (Cheltenham), youth centre (Hay), public hall (Berlin); salons-urban/ located in metropolitan cities, contemporary festivals are more mixed: City/ Country/ World = they aspire to overcome the urban/rural & centre/margin binary Peter Florance, founder of Hay, committed to show that culture and literary life is not concentrated in the capital. He is also starting new literary festivals in different places of the globe; Objective: cultural encounter to open new spaces for ideas and to support writers and literary institutions of those countries

Festivals, even if large in size, are concentrated in time and this allows cost containment in a way that also makes them attractive as regeneration instruments for somewhat marginal places. Hosts: 18th & 19th century salons: mostly women as salon hosts Hay: Peter Florance, director/ founder = theatre actor with background in modern and medieval literature Berlin Festival: Urlich Schribner, director = architect Borderline festival: Urlich Janetzki founder/ director = runs Literary Colloquium Berlin The role of media: Very important Interview format is widespread: discussion between a journalist and a writer Media sometimes contributes directly to festival organisation: Berlin festival is supported by Der Spiegel and Deutchland Kultur Radio; Hay (Guardian) Format of events: Entertainment: pleasure through intellectual discourse, performance of the written word (and of other kinds), food & drink For P. Florance the core of the festival is getting together to discuss books, arts and politics Literary festivals are harder to stage for general public than others (i.e. music, film festivals) Dominant format: focus on the individual artist-author & discussion; moving away from mere presentation of the works to discussion about creative process in social context. Politics: To present authors, but also to discus social and political developments with reference to books (Hay includes the Raymond Williams Lecture on Culture and Society) Berlin Festival: international, interested in post-nation, multiculturalism, exile; opening German literary public to outside voices Internationalization: Towards discovering world literatures Debating topical global issues Organisation: Usually run on not-for-profit basis

Engaging a lot of volunteers Hay: ticket sales + Guardian sponsorship of 50.000 per/a + Wales Arts Council; employs up to 15 people Berlin Festival: budget 6000.000 (City of Berlin gives 450.000; sells 30.000 tickets per/a) Workshop/ Discussion: Media (commercialization) & Public Sphere (Habermas, Bourdieu, Rajagoptal); Hay-on-Wye Jaipur Literary Festival (the Rushdi incident)