Festivals in the Pandemic

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.¹ 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.² 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’.³ 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.⁴ 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.⁵ There have been studies of regional festival circuits, such as Christina McMahon’s focus on the Lusophone (Portuguese) group of nations and the Asia Pacific by Denise Varney, Peter Eckersall, Chris Hudson, and Barbara Hatley.⁶ Edited collections by the International Federation for Theatre Research’s (IFTR) Theatrical Event Working Group and the Cambridge Companion to International Theatre Festivals, edited by Knowles, bring together festival researchers from around the world to provide a global perspective on festival models and histories.⁷ Beyond Theatre and Performance Studies, a broad range of disciplines have a stake in and theoretical take on festivals, with Cultural Geography, for example, offering critical analysis of the relationship between festivals and cities.⁸

What is clear, is that not only scholarship, but festivals, have evolved over the past 20 years, leading Keren Zaiontz to define a ‘second-wave’ of artist-led festivals that focus on socially engaged art through curatorial practices.⁹ Zaiontz has been particularly influential in charting and documenting the shifts in festival curation, modes of spectatorship, and ‘how arts and social activists are reconfiguring the space of the festival through their political actions’.¹⁰ This call to be attentive to shifts in the festival landscape has been furthered by Knowles, who seeks not only to ‘critique [the] cultural colonialism of festivals’ but also to highlight how ‘festivals can and have begun to engage more closely and critically with multiple cultures in context and in conversation with one another’.¹¹ As the contributions to this special issue attest, some of the changes and trajectories that were already on the horizon have been accelerated and expediated by recent events.

The global health pandemic has had a devasting impact on lives and livelihoods and necessary restrictions on mass gatherings and international travel have acutely disrupted festivals and touring. As Zaiontz has observed, ‘Festivals are almost always symptomatic of the current social moment in which they take place. To study a festival is to take stock of the temper of the times in which participants gather to celebrate, to witness, to consume, to belong, and even to resist’.¹² While it is too early to predict the long-term effects on festivals and the broader live performance ecology, this special issue brings together the perspectives and experiences of festival directors, artists, and researchers to document and reflect on the challenges, as well as the opportunities, presented by the pandemic up to this point in 2022. It is built around short, invited contributions that take the form of interviews, reflections, and critical essays that were commissioned and edited by CTR’s editorial team. Different parts of the world have experienced waves of the pandemic at different times and the festivals represented in this issue have taken distinct approaches in response to their own national, and indeed local, contexts. Nevertheless, a number of common themes emerge across the experiences of festivals and festival culture during the pandemic period.

Crisis Response

The early period of the pandemic was marked by festival cancellations, postponements, and the need to ‘unproduce’ events. Julia Varley, from Denmark’s Odin Teatret and the Magdalena Project, opens the issue with a reflection on the early days of the pandemic in Europe and how artists’ working practices evolved through its different stages. The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020.¹³ Festival organisers then made choices about how to respond to lockdowns and international border closures, and whether to experiment with online formats. The concern reported by several festival directors not only for artists’ livelihoods but also for their mental health and well-being during this period calls attention to the structural precarity within the live performance sector that seeps available stores that could be drawn on to show resilience in the face of crisis. Here, the differential funding structures and the goodwill of investors directly impacted how festivals could respond. Mainstage, subsidised festivals – such as the Manchester International Festival (MIF) and Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland Arts Festival) – that were in a position to, made the decision to honour contracts and pay artists and companies whose performances were cancelled. Festival directors John McGrath (MIF) and Shona McCullagh (Auckland) recount how, with the support of their funders and government, they worked to support artists who had lost current and upcoming work through various initiatives in the early stages of the pandemic.

Fringe organisations, like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society (EFFS), that do not typically receive public funding to produce work, were left in a dire financial position once they had refunded artists their registration fees for the cancelled 2020 season. The UK government bailed out both the EFFS and the major commercial fringe venues in Edinburgh, although there have been recent accusations of the mismanagement of these funds.¹⁴ This money was directed at sustaining the fringe infrastructure through the crisis period, and the EFFS ran a separate crowd-funding campaign to raise money for fringe artists and producers. The disproportional impact of cancellations, and later, restrictions around audience numbers on fringe artists once again calls into question the economic viability of the open-access model in which financial risk is borne by ‘artrepreneurs’.¹⁵ As Hanna Huber shows in her contribution on OFF d’Avignon in this issue, the right of central organising body to make the decision to cancel on behalf of the hundreds of the micro-organisations involved, contradicts the very spirit of artistic freedom on the Fringe.

Festivals in Lockdown

During the early period of the pandemic, before vaccines had been developed and made readily available, many festivals turned to the online space to maintain a connection with artists, with collaborators, and with audiences. Festivals such as the MIF held regular online ‘drop-in’ sessions where freelance artists could connect, share experiences, and explore avenues for collaboration. Festivals that already had experience in the digital space for international collaborations – such as Gateshead International Festival of Theatre (GIFT) in the North of England and the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) – drew on their experience and skill in this area to develop an online version of the festival or to facilitate international collaborations by connecting companies overseas with local video artists who could realise their vision via remote instruction. Some festivals like the St. Patrick’s Festival in Ireland, Isra-Drama in Israel, and GIFT in England found new audiences and international connections by televising their events or moving online. As Interim Director of the St Patrick’s festival Anna McGowan tells Danielle Lynch in interview, televising the parade on 17 March 2021 enabled the festival to bring international audiences to ‘Ireland, virtually, in a way that we never would have been given the opportunity to do before’ (p. 268). Not all festivals sought to inhabit the digital space, however, instead reaffirming their commitment to co-presence as fundamental to live performance. In a moving reflection on the difficult decision to cancel the Tampere Theatre Festival in Finland in 2020, Hilkka-Liisa Iivanainen discusses the burden of cancellation and the ambivalent feelings of the curators in having made that decision.

With large scale in-person productions unable to go ahead in 2020, festival organisations could turn to alternative models of co-production. Some of this was put towards building the required infrastructure for digital work. As Jay Pather from the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) in Cape Town explains, the ICA’s Live Art Festival developed a digital fellowship programme to connect live artists with digital designers to help them to restage their performances via a digital platform. In Toronto, too, the SummerWorks Festival ran an at-home residency to provide performance artists with dramaturgical support and resources to pay for video editors to support the development of new projects.

This kind of approach enabled some festivals to build on and extend what Karen Fricker and Melissa Poll term their ‘equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives’ (p. 334). The Festival TransAmériques (FTA) in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal, Canada, for example, had already begun addressing institutional ‘discrimination and exclusion’ and ensuring representation of Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) artists within the programme. The pandemic, however, led to the Respirations programme that extended this support through small grants to local artists to develop work as a kind of ‘research and development initiative’ (p. 334). The death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020 and the global Black Lives Matter movement it ignited reinforced festivals’ focus on redressing ‘cultural colonialism’ and racial injustices within their programming but also organisational structures. As Laura Nanni, of SummerWorks, tells Fricker and Poll, BIPOC artists need ‘agency in conceptualising and decision-making. It’s impacting our thinking and planning operationally, not just curatorially; at the board level, festival artists are talking about it and it’s influencing how they create’ (p. 273-74). Decolonisation and inclusion have remained at the forefront of discussions throughout the subsequent periods of the pandemic.

Socially Distanced Festival

Vaccine roll-outs changed the landscape once again for live performance, allowing some in-person events to return in 2021 albeit in a limited capacity, while presenting a new set of challenges. While those that could rejoiced in in-person gathering after periods of lockdown, many festival organisers retained the fear that their events would become ‘super spreaders’. As Shimrit Ron, from Isra-Drama, reveals in conversation with Bryce Lease, there are increased expectations from audiences and stakeholders that at least part of the programme will be made available online, which has led many festivals to experiment with hybrid models. The 2022 Auckland Arts Festival programme, for example, included two recorded theatre offerings amongst its otherwise live programme, which was expanded when it had to pivot fully online when mass gatherings were once again restricted in Aotearoa just weeks before the festival due to the Omicron variant. One of these performances was Hannah Lavery’s Lament for Sheku Bayoh, which explores Scottish identity and racism in light of the death of the eponymous black man in police custody in Scotland in 2015, echoing Floyd’s death in the US five years later. With themes that spoke to international concerns, this show, which was produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and pre-recorded at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, had previously screened online during the Edinburgh International Festival in 2021 before Auckland in 2022, suggesting the emergence of a nascent festival circuit for recorded performance.

Many jurisdictions required strict safety protocols, from reduced capacities to ensure social distancing was maintained to testing regimes or requirements to show proof of vaccination. Sir Anril Tiatco’s critical essay on state-sponsored Catholic festivals in the Philippines explores how large-scale religious cultural events were shifted online or, in some cases, recreated as motorcade-processions through the streets along pre-advertised routes to abide by health measures. In an interview with James Rowson in December 2021, prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Roman Dolzhanskiy recounts how the New European Theatre (NET) Festival and Territory Festival negotiated evolving requirements for quite dissimilar events in Russia. Health advice and government implementation of safety measures continued to shift rapidly throughout this period of the pandemic in response to new waves or variants. Many of the festival directors who have given their time to be interviewed for this issue report the need to triple plan events to cover all contigencies. In many cases, requirements varied between regions and local jurisdictions.

David Calder’s critical essay examines protests that were sparked by the cancellation of both the 2021 International Festival of Street Theatre and the rencontres artistiques professionnelles (professional artistic encounters) organised in its stead in Aurillac in France. He notes that anger was directed against the Cantal prefecture that cancelled the outdoor street performance in Aurillac when indoor-festivals had gone ahead in both Avignon and Cannes. In Calder’s analysis, the protestors participating in the performative demonstration La Grande Manifestive on 18 August 2021 conflated the risk posed by COVID-19 with the health response to it. Demonstrators construed measures – particularly France’s pass sanitaire (health pass) – as part of an agenda to increase the securitisation and privatisation of public space following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and therefore as an existential threat to street performance. Such demonstrations also recall protests against public health measures in other parts of the world, including the Canadian truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates in Ottawa in January–February 2022 and the 23-day occupation of Aotearoa New Zealand’s parliamentary grounds in Wellington, which was ended forcibly on 2 March 2022.¹⁶

Rethinking International Engagement

The pandemic has not only strained health-care systems and tested the effectiveness of governments’ crisis management, it has also revealed, and in some cases exacerbated, inequities both between and within nation states along lines of racial and cultural difference. International border closures protected those privileged enough to live in nation-states with sea borders until the majority of the population was vaccinated, but denied family reunions and restricted access to those who could afford a place in managed quarantine programmes. As Pather reflects, whole nations were ‘shunned for naming something that is already happening in various parts of the world’ when flights from South Africa were cancelled when the Omicron variant was first identified (p. 294). Digital technologies such as closed captioning and audio description have broadened accessibility to performance on the one hand, while limiting participation in online festivals to those with access to devices and stable wi-fi on the other. In a reflection on programming the British Film Institute’s (BFI) London Film Festival during the pandemic, programme advisors indicate how it has indelibly changed how work circulates, how it is programmed, and how it is engaged with. There is, in many ways, a before and after COVID model of how festivals operate, run, and programme. What lessons have been learned during the turbulent years between 2020 and 2022 and how will this thinking influence festival programming and practices long term? How have they re-thought the scale of work produced as well as different models of local and international engagement to reduce carbon emissions?

As Kris Nelson reveals, festivals like LIFT have long been experimenting with models of international collaboration that reduce the need for travel. This has also circumvented the ‘structural racism embedded in the UK Home Office’ that manifests when artists from the Global South are denied visas (p. 314). Citing the examples of Rimini Protokoll’s 100% City and Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Haircuts by Children projects that have been reproduced in different locations around the world, Nelson explains the benefits of locally realising the productions of international companies. In ‘Concept Touring’, ideas travel in place of artists, crew, and their accompanying freight, which provided a model for working remotely with the Nest Collective from Nairobi in 2020 when international travel was not possible. Travel is once again a reality, and yet many festivals are rethinking their models of international engagement as part of broader climate action plans. Border closures gave the Auckland Arts Festival, for example, an opportunity to focus on local work from Aotearoa for the 2021 festival and particularly the work of Māori and Pasifika artists and companies.

Place-based festivals like GIFT and FTA are experimenting with residencies for international artists to deepen their engagement with the local community and seek to facilitate regional tours to make the most out of intercontinental flights. In conversation with Helen Freshwater, GIFT director Kate Craddock explains how such residencies would operate: international artists ‘might develop a piece of work through support from GIFT over two or three years, and as part of that, they will spend time here in residencies, interacting and developing relationships with people who live here – both online and in person’ (p. 327). Montréal’s FTA is similarly committed to finding equitable solutions to the ‘intersection of ecology and coloniality’ to avoid overburdening artists from the Global South with the responsibility for reducing carbon emissions (p. 334). Co-directors Martine Dennewald and Jessie Mill explain their vision in interview with Fricker and Poll, to organise small tours and workshop series for visiting artists so that they can maximise their time in Canada and North America.

Sustainability, precarity, access, inclusion, and decolonisation remain key themes and conversations guiding festival models and practices in the future. In their critical essay in this issue, Roaa Ali and Christopher Balme provide an overview and analysis of festivals in the age of COVID. Their study surveys over 50 ‘online news, scholarly reviews and reports, and governmental – particularly in the UK – guidance on the topic’ to assess the ‘seismic disruption to the industry’ (p. 337). They raise the question of whether the existential crisis posed by COVID-19 will lead to long-term organisational transformation or whether the status quo will return once the period of crisis is over. While it is too early to predict the answer to this question, the years 2020 to 2022 have served to accelerate developments in some areas – at least temporarily – while reaffirming the core experience of co-presence between audience and artist that festivals offer. In her reflection towards the end of the issue, Geddy Aniksdal, from Grenland Friteater, Norway and the Magdalena Project, poetically recaps the phenomenological shifts throughout this period encapsulating the frustration of lockdown and the importance of reconnecting with the natural world. Finally, Helen Freshwater captures the ambivalence in returning to in-person events with her spectator’s account of GIFT 2022. While there is an appetite for continued digital engagement, partly to avoid the health risks associated with in-person events, artists are also responding to ‘the pandemic’s potential to remake expectations around the duration of the performative encounter and the relationships that can be created through it’ (p. 350).

The pandemic has given festivals and artists the opportunity to reaffirm what is vital about live performance and place-based festivals that we need to preserve into the future. By bringing different approaches and voices into conversation, this special issue has sought to share this knowledge while documenting these strategies for future reference.

Notes

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).

3. David Bradby and Maria M. Delgado, ‘Editorial’, Contemporary Theatre Review 13, no. 4 (2003): 1–4 (1).

4. Ric Knowles, ‘The Edinburgh Festival and Fringe: Lessons for Canada?’, Canadian Theatre Review, no. 102 (2000): 88–96; and Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

5. Jen Harvie, Staging the UK (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Jen Harvie, ‘Cultural Effects of the Edinburgh International Festival: Elitism, Identities, Industries’, Contemporary Theatre Review 13, no. 4 (2003): 12–26; and Jen Harvie, ‘International Theatre Festivals in the UK: The Edinburgh Festival Fringe as a Model Neo-Liberal Market’, in The Cambridge Companion to International Theatre Festivals, ed. Ric Knowles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

6. Christina S. McMahon, Recasting Transnationalism Through Performance: Theatre Festivals in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Denise Varney et al., Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

7. Temple Hauptfleisch et al., eds., Festivalising!: Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007); and Ric Knowles, ed., The Cambridge Companion to International Theatre Festivals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

8. For an interdisciplinary approach, see Sarah Thomasson, The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide (Cham: Springer, 2022).

9. Keren Zaiontz, ‘From Post-War to “Second-Wave”: International Performing Arts Festivals’, in The Cambridge Companion to International Theatre Festivals, ed. Ric Knowles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

10. Keren Zaiontz, Theatre & Festivals (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 12.

11. Ric Knowles, International Theatre Festivals and Twenty-First-Century Interculturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 5.

12. Zaiontz, Theatre & Festivals, 4.

13. ‘WHO Director-General’s Opening Remarks at the Media Briefing on COVID-19’, World Health Organisation, March 11, 2020, https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19—11-march-2020 (accessed August 9, 2022).

14. Severin Carrell, ‘Edinburgh Fringe Tries to Quell Revolt After Criticism of 2022 Event’, Guardian, July 7, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/jul/07/edinburgh-fringe-tries-to-quell-revolt-criticism-2022-festival-comedians-open-letter (accessed August 11, 2022).

15. Harvie, ‘International Theatre Festivals in the UK’; Sarah Thomasson, ‘“Too Big for its Boots”?: Precarity on the Adelaide Fringe’, Contemporary Theatre Review 29, no. 1 (2019): 39–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2018.1556208.

16. Leyland Cecco, ‘Canada Truckers’ Vaccine Protest Spirals into Calls to Repeal All Public Health Rules’, Guardian, January 28, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/28/canada-truckers-covid-vaccine-mandate-protest-government (accessed August 9, 2022); and ‘Covid-19: 28 Parliament Protesters Believed to Have Tested Positive’, Radio New Zealand, March 7, 2022, https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/462884/covid-19-28-parliament-protesters-believed-to-have-tested-positive (accessed August 9, 2022).