The Festival is a Theatrical Event

Abstract

Are contemporary festivals an empty spectacle?George Steiner for one suggested in a 1996 address that closing down of the Edinburgh Festival would be 'rare but vivid mark of honesty within excellence'.The contemporary world no longer had a need for festivals as symbols of 'the credo of a community or the aspirations of a political regime,' he argued.1 This critique of the festival as a 'meaning-free zone' seems to be linked with a kind of revulsion at the range of excesses often associated with the phenomenon of festival in the contemporary industrialized world, and the argument goes that these excesses tend to obscure and in fact diminish the 'original purpose' of festivals as we have understood it via various anthropological and sociological discourses.Having observed a series of festivals of the high art and the 'boutique' variety in the city of Brisbane, Australia over the past eight years, we have come to the conclusion that there are other productive readings which help us to account for the evident proliferation of the phenomenon.These festivals have made an increasing contribution to what one might refer to as a sense of communitas in the city; and it is in this issue that the identification of the 'festival as theatrical event' finds resonance.Visual excess is perhaps only the most obvious of these festivalesque transgressions.Indeed, for many commentators and theorists, following Debord's categorization of spectacle as 'the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life' 2 the festival can be seen as the essence of a crass commercialism -the triumph of representation over substance.It is certainly true that

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