This study puts forward a politically vital and intellectually compelling proposition. Instead of taking the post-war European ‘elite destination festival model’ (which includes Edinburgh International Festival and Festival d’Avignon) as a model for exploring the intercultural potential of contemporary theatre festivals, Knowles looks to ancient and contemporary trans-Indigenous festival cultures. Whereas the former tends to recall Ancient Greek festival forms, implying at least an element of competition, nation-building, and ‘passive spectatorship’, the latter’s social function is rooted in mutual witnessing, relational exchange, and the active negotiation of differences. Consequently, Knowles’s discussion of festival types – spanning chapters on Indigeneity and Indigenous festivals, destination festivals, curated live art festivals, fringe festivals and other alternative forms, and intra-cultural transnational festivals (such as festivals centred on language groups) – begins from this alternative set of values and practices.
The analysis throughout brings into dialogue the meta-event structures of various festivals with close readings of hosted performances as a way of recognizing that they are mutually constitutive for the experiences of festival attendees. To that end, each chapter opens with a short vignette reflecting on Knowles’s own festival-going. The decolonial perspective taken pays close attention to how festivals facilitate exchanges between artists and audiences beyond the programming of performances. Formats like workshops, panel discussions, or communal eating (as exemplified by Ontario’s IMPACT festival) are drawn into the discussion and are recognized as core elements of a festival’s function.
Knowles’s volume succeeds in covering a significant portion of the twenty-first-century theatre festival landscape by engaging with festivals based in different cultures and regions, and produced at various scales. Occasionally, the critical perspective risks reinforcing an overly binary understanding of spectatorship and spectacle, presumed to be passive and consumerist, on the one hand, and participation and direct dialogue, on the other. But it regularly raises fascinating questions; for example, about the possibilities of transformational experiences within a marketized festival economy, the risks of ‘representing’ a culture (especially marginalized cultures entangled in unequal power relations), the politics of festival leadership and leadership models, and the tools that festivals have at their disposal to create genuine intercultural exchanges between different groups of spectators and artists.
A key shift in festival cultures teased out across the volume is from programming, wherein festivals pick perceived highlights from an ‘international touring menu’ that is often Eurocentric or problematically retraces colonial trade routes, to curation, which indicates more deliberate methods of festival organization based on defined artistic and cultural values. Curatorial practices are positioned as offering some hope for festivals to resist flattened globalism and neoliberal markets. Building on this shift, the excellent conclusion looks to the future of festivals, and accessibly gathers key practical insights on how to facilitate intercultural exchanges. Overall, this is a critically and conceptually crucial project for festival researchers, as well as students and practitioners in fields such as curating, producing, and programming.
