THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO

INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVALS

The global rise of festival culture and experience has taken over that
which used to merely be events. The Cambridge Companion to
International Theatre Festivals provides an up-to-date, contextualized
account of the worldwide reach and impact of the ‘festivalization’ of
culture. It introduces new methodologies for the study of the global
network of theatre production using digital humanities, raises ques-
tions about how alternative origin stories might impact the study of
festivals, investigates the festivalized production of space in the
world’s ‘Festival Cities’, and re-examines the social role and cultural
work of twenty-first-century theatre, performance, and multi-arts
festivals. With chapters on festivals in Africa, Asia, Australia, the
Arab world, the francophone world, Europe, North America, and
Latin America, it analyses festivals as sites of intercultural negotiation
and exchange.

  is a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from

the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. He is a former editor
of Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and Canadian Theatre Review,
and an award-winning author or editor of twenty books on drama
and theatre.
     

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 THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANION TO
INTERNATIONAL
THEATRE FESTIVALS

     
RIC KNOWLES
University of Guelph, Ontario
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 For
Christine Bold
 Contents

List of Contributors page ix

Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 
Ric Knowles

     

 From Post-War to ‘Second Wave’: International
Performing Arts Festivals 
Keren Zaiontz
 International Festivals, the Practice of Co-production,
and the Challenges for Documentation in a Digital Age 
Alexandra Portmann
 City Festivals and Festival Cities 
Marjana Johansson
 Indigenous Festivals 
Ric Knowles

       

 European Festivals 
Erika Fischer-Lichte
 International Theatre Festivals in the UK: The Edinburgh
Festival Fringe as a Model Neo-liberal Market 
Jen Harvie

vii
viii Contents
 Under the Radar Festival, New York: Experimental,
Urban, and Global 
Carol Martin
 The Australian Festival Network 
Sarah Thomasson
 Theatre Festivals in Post-Arab Spring Countries 
Khalid Amine
 Staging East Africa through Global Exchange:
The Kampala International Theatre Festival 
Julia Goldstein
 The National Arts Festival in Grahamstown: Culture,
Economics, and Race in South Africa 
Loren Kruger
 Reckoning with Historical Conflicts in East Asian
Theatre Festivals: The BeSeTo Theatre Festival and
Gwangju Media Arts Festival 
Hayana Kim
 Festivals in the Francophone World as Sites of
Cultural Struggle 
Emily Sahakian
 International Festivals in Latin America: Festival
Santiago a Mil and Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires 
Jean Graham-Jones
 RUTAS | ROUTES: A Festival Commons of Hemispheric
Interculturalidad 
Natalie Alvarez

Appendix: List of International Theatre, Performance,

and Multi-Arts Festivals 
Works Cited 
Further Reading 
Index 
 Contributors

Natalie Alvarez is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies

at Ryerson University’s School of Performance. She is the author of
Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance ()
and co-editor of two books on Latina/o Canadian theatre and perfor-
mance ().
Khalid Amine is Senior Professor of Performance Studies at Abdelmalek
Essaâdi University, Tetouan, and Founding President of the Interna-
tional Centre for Performance Studies in Tangier. He is the winner of
the  Helsinki Prize of the International Federation for Theatre
Research. Among his books are Dramatic Art and the Myth of Origins
() and (with Marvin Carlson) The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and
Tunisia (). He is editor of the Arab Journal of Performance Studies.
Erika Fischer-Lichte is Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies on
‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ at Freie Universität Berlin. She has
had guest professorships in China, India, Japan, Norway, Russia, and
the United States. She has published widely on the aesthetics, history,
and theory of theatre and performativity.
Julia Goldstein’s research focuses on global theatre and performance at
the intersection of international exchange and activism. Her writing has
appeared in Theatre Journal and Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora
Thoughts and Letters.
Jean Graham-Jones is Lucille Lortel Professor of Theatre at the City
University of New York’s Graduate Center. The author of Exorcising
History: Argentine Theater under Dictatorship () and Evita, Inevita-
bly: Performing Argentina’s Female Icons Before and After Eva Perón
(), she is currently writing a book about the challenges of contem-
porary performance translation.

ix
x List of Contributors
Jen Harvie teaches at Queen Mary University of London. Her recent
books include Fair Play – Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (),
The Only Way Home Is through the Show: Performance Work of Lois
Weaver (), and Scottee: I Made It (). She co-edits Palgrave
Macmillan’s series Theatre & and makes the podcast Stage Left with Jen
Harvie.
Marjana Johansson is Senior Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour at the
University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on organizational diversity
and inequality, and cultural production with a focus on festivals. Recent
research looks at the staging of diversity through festivals, and identity
construction in the context of boutique festivals.
Hayana Kim is a doctoral candidate in Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre
and Drama at Northwestern University. She examines contemporary
South Korean performances in the service of democracy. Her work has
been recognized with the Social Science Research Council’s Interna-
tional Dissertation Research Fellowship, funded by the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation.
Ric Knowles is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph
and winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian
Association for Theatre Research. He is a former editor of Canadian
Theatre Review, Modern Drama, and Theatre Journal. His most recent
book is Performing the Intercultural City ().
Loren Kruger is the author of, among other books, The Drama of South
Africa (), A Century of South African Theatre (forthcoming), and
the award-winning Post-Imperial Brecht (Cambridge University Press,
). She is a former editor of Theatre Journal and teaches Compar-
ative and English Literatures, and Theatre and Performance Studies at
the University of Chicago.
Carol Martin is Professor of Drama at New York University. Theatre of the
Real () and Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage () are her
recent books. She is a guest editor of three special issues of TDR:
‘Performing the City’, ‘Reclaiming the Real’, and ‘Documentary Theatre’.
Alexandra Portmann is a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary Univer-
sity of London and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
She holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of Bern. Her
research project ‘Mobile Repertoires – European Theatre Festivals and
Digital Culture’ is founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
 List of Contributors xi
Emily Sahakian is Associate Professor of Theatre and French at the
University of Georgia and the author of Staging Creolization: Women’s
Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean ().
Sarah Thomasson is Lecturer in Theatre at Victoria University of Wel-
lington, New Zealand. She writes on contemporary theatre and perfor-
mance practices with a focus on international arts festivals and their
fringes, and her recent publications explore debates over the continued
cultural desirability and economic viability of the Adelaide Festival and
Fringe.
Keren Zaiontz is Assistant Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in the
Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University, Canada. Her
publications on the cultural politics of festivals and mega-events can be
found in Canadian Theatre Review, Contemporary Theatre Review, and
PUBLIC. She is the author of Theatre & Festivals ().
 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all of the contributors to this volume for their
patience and care; my research assistants Nicole Carey and (especially)
Cynthia Ing; Tracy Davis for putting me up to this; and Kate Brett, Eilidh
Burrett, and all the patient and helpful folks at Cambridge University
Press. As always, I owe my greatest debts to the dedicatee of this volume,
Christine Bold, without whom . . .

xii
 Introduction
Ric Knowles

Since the s there has been an exponential increase in the numbers and
types of festivals around the world. Events that used merely to be events
have been ‘festivalized’: structured, marketed, and promoted in ways that
stress brand identities, urban centres as tourist destinations, and the
corporate attractiveness of ‘creative cities’, all participating in the ‘eventi-
fication’ of cultures and economies that are no longer based on material
objects and products, but on activities. Cities that used merely to be cities
have been rebranded as ‘festival cities’, and festivals themselves have been
repurposed and ‘eventified’ in a dazzling number of ways for a wide range
of social, cultural, economic, and promotional purposes.
This Companion considers the relatively small slice of the large global
festival pie that includes or features theatre, dance, and live art, and it
focuses on theatre and multi-arts festivals that are in some sense, at least,
international. For reasons of space, excluded from extended consideration
are non-professional theatre and theatre for young audiences; European
Cities of Culture, Cultural Olympiads, and similar ‘mega-events’; festivals
focusing on work produced within a single nation-state; events based on
single or specialized performing arts disciplines such as opera, puppetry,
circus, clown, and street theatre; online festivals; extended seasons of
repertory theatre such as the many Shakespeare festivals in North America
or Ontario’s Shaw Festival; and series, such as the Next Wave Festival at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music, that call themselves festivals but present
work sequentially over a period of several months and do not involve
theatre companies being in the same place at the same time. Also excluded,
for the most part, are ‘cultural’ festivals – festivals, often of the heritage or
folkloric variety, that celebrate diasporic cultures within multicultural
societies in ways that are best regarded as preservationist and lay claim to
varying kinds and degrees of static ‘authenticity’. But the exclusion of
cultural festivals applies primarily to Western diasporic contexts rather
than Indigenous nations on all continents, where the differences between

  
ceremony and theatre are less clear. This, of course, raises questions about
definitional fields around the concept of the festival itself.
For the purposes of this book, international theatre festivals consist of
organized events that, over a limited period of usually a few days to a few
weeks, offer a concentrated series of performances from different countries
or nations for local and visiting audiences. They are a type of cultural
performance that embeds other performances within itself, in the process
transforming them cumulatively into a kind of meta-performance. Sitting
comfortably within this definition, however, are a wide variety of festivals
that serve an equally wide assortment of purposes for very different
audiences, participants, and stakeholders.
The ‘founding’ festivals of the twentieth century, at Edinburgh and
Avignon in , initially served to shore up Western civilization and
(high) culture in the wake of the devastations of the Second World War.
Subsequently they have become progenitors and participants in a global
circuit of ‘élite’, festivals that circulate high-end performance products
within a non-local, globalized marketplace for which, in many cases, they
were created. These festivals, in turn, have become keystone events for
many urban centres hoping to brand themselves as ‘festival cities’ or
‘creative cities’, destination magnets equally for tourist dollars and for
corporations capitalizing on ‘creative class’ cachet within the post-
industrial ‘experience economy’.
Edinburgh and Adelaide also gave rise early on to their respective
‘Fringe’ and ‘Off’ festivals, originally intended as local, popular-cultural
alternatives to the élite festivals’ ‘high culture’. These have since given birth
to a vast global network of over  free-market fringe festivals where
theatre companies, comedians, and others from around the world hope to
lure presenters and promoters (often from other festivals) to launch their
works’ world tours.
Perhaps in reaction to both the élite and fringe festival circuits, a cluster
of what Keren Zaiontz in these pages calls ‘second-wave’ festivals devel-
oped mostly since the late s that are artist-run and tend to be curated
strategically to juxtapose specific artists and often interdisciplinary, exper-
imental, or community-based works rather than programmed cafeteria-
style from the touring marketplace. Often smaller in scale and occurring in
smaller urban centres than the élite festivals, these include such events as
the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas; the Time-Based Arts Festival in
Portland, Oregon; the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival
in Vancouver, British Columbia; the ANTI Contemporary Arts Festival in
 Introduction 
Kuopio, Finland; Metropolis, in Copenhagen, Denmark; and the member
festivals of the FiT (Festivals in Transition) network in Europe.
For many in the West these first, fringe, and second-wave festivals are
the most familiar, but they are far from the only kinds of festival peppering
the globe in the twenty-first century. Some, such as the Arab Theatre
Festival which circulates annually among urban centres in the Arab world,
virtually exclude considerations of the festival circuit and marketplace and
attempt to negotiate and shore up a coherent Arab identity and theatrical
practice that is resistant to Western theatrical hegemony. Similarly,
PANAFEST (the Pan-African Historical Theatre Festival), on Ghana’s
Cape Coast (best known for its historic role in the transatlantic slave
trade), is dedicated to celebrating African civilizations and exploring ways
of improving life for Africans around the world. Other festivals, such as the
Lusophone festival circuit encompassing Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, and
Mozambique, examined by Christina S. McMahon in her book Recasting
Transnationalism through Performance, are used to negotiate complex post-
colonial power relationships among countries that share a (colonial) lan-
guage. Still others, such as Teatro La Candelaria’s FESTA (Festival Alter-
nativo de Bogotá) in Colombia, which occurs at the same time as Bogotá’s
élite Festival Iberoamericano, exist performatively to initiate political con-
versation and critique within the complex of countries, cultures, and
peoples lumped together by the Global North as Latin America. The
George Town Festival in Penang, Malaysia, serves its sponsors as a site at
which to promote the national government’s ‘one Malaysia’ policy, uniting
its various ethnic and cultural minorities under one flag, but it also serves
those communities as public space in which their differences can be made
visible and negotiated. And the NIB (Nepal, India, Bangladesh) festival
works to explore histories and identities across nation-states on the Indian
subcontinent. Finally, Indigenous festivals, such as Vancouver’s Talking
Stick and Toronto’s Living Ritual festivals, the Laura Aboriginal Dance
Festival on Australia’s Cape York Peninsula, and Taipei’s Global Indige-
nous People’s Performing Arts Festival exist to negotiate performance
forms and forge solidarities within a trans-Indigenous world.
The audiences for these and other festivals vary as much as the partic-
ipants, ranging from cultural tourists, theatre and arts professionals, artists,
academics, and aficionados to immigrant communities in diaspora looking
for contact with the culture of the homeland. For many, the festival is
experienced as what Allessandro Falassi in  called a ‘time out of time’,
a unique temporality that is set apart from people’s quotidian lives for
  
experiences that are somehow liminal, uplifting, out-of-body, or set apart.
Scholarship on festivals that is not primarily concerned with their eco-
nomic, management, or policy dimensions is largely concerned with
whether the time-out-of-time experience is genuinely transformative (of
individual subjectivities, communities, or places), or is fundamentally
cathartic, releasing unruly carnivalesque energies in order to enable the
efficient restoration of a renewed social order. But most agree with Erika
Fischer-Lichte that ‘festivals create communities’ (Routledge ), however
temporarily. And in doing so they are able to serve as sites of interaction
(among artists, among audience members, and between artists and audi-
ences) that may involve intercultural negotiation, exchange, and solidar-
ities, and may invoke what Margaret Werry has called ‘the cosmopolitan
imagination’, referring to the new cosmopolitanisms of the early s:
‘the imperfect, contested, perspectival worldings attempted by subjects
enmeshed in the vastly asymmetric flows and processes of globalization’
(unpublished response to ‘Festivals’ panel, American Society for Theatre
Research, November ).
Most scholarship on festivals, including most chapters in this volume,
begin with the post-war festivals of the second half of the twentieth
century, but festivals have existed for a very long time. Indeed, as I argue
in my chapter in this volume (Chapter ), from long before recorded
Western history to the present the Indigenous peoples of the world have
engaged in ceremonies and communal performance activities that could
not without diminishment be called ‘theatre’, but might, from a Western
perspective, be called festivals. In most Western theatre histories, the
standard starting point, for both theatre and festivals, however, is ancient
Greece in the fifth century BCE. ‘Once upon a time’, as Frédéric Maurin
says, ‘theatre and festivals were born simultaneously’ (). But like all ‘once
upon a times’, this appears to be a myth. There is plenty of evidence that
the festivals dedicated to the Greek god Dionysus where dramas are often
said to have been first performed between  and  BCE were
anticipated by and modelled on annual festivals in Egypt that re-enacted
the myth of Osiris  years before (see Zarrilli ), and that the
bedrock, not only of Western theatre history but of Western civilization,
is not Greece, as is often said, but Africa.
It is for this reason that this Companion, while written largely from the
perspective of Western scholarship and deliberately focusing on recent,
twenty-first-century developments within the festival landscape, attempts
to move beyond a purely Euro-American focus, incorporating work on Asia,
Africa, and the pan-American, Arab, and Indigenous worlds. The book is
 Introduction 
organized, in Part I, to provide historical and theoretical contexts and tools
for the study of festivals, and, in Part II, to map, without pretending to
provide comprehensive coverage, representative festivals from around the
world within their local, national, continental, and cultural contexts.
Contributors were asked to locate their work historically and theoreti-
cally. They were also asked relationally to consider international theatre
and combined arts festivals in the twenty-first century as sites of tension
between the local and global and sites of (unequal) negotiation between
cultures and cultural forms; to analyse the impact of globalization, urban
promotional discourses such as ‘creative city’ theory and city branding on
the ways in which intercultural negotiations are framed and practiced at
festivals understood to be intercultural ‘contact zones’; and to investigate
ways in which festivals in some instances are being newly reconfigured to
better enable cross-cultural understanding both in increasingly
intercultural ‘global cities’ and in smaller centres.
Keren Zaiontz’s chapter, ‘From Post-War to “Second-Wave”: Interna-
tional Performing Arts Festivals’, leads off Part I, and charts a shift in
twentieth- to twenty-first-century festivals from what she sees as the
restorative nationalism of the post-war festivals to the modelling of new
social relationships and artistic processes in so-called second-wave festivals
in Europe and the Americas. Treating festivals of both types as ‘pre-
figurative performances’ that model in their own organizational structures
what they hope to achieve, she also perceives, perhaps also pre-figuratively,
a shift away from the traditional festival’s ‘time-out-of-time’ to a modelling
of socially engaged, activist, and often participatory intervention that
exceeds the boundaries of festival time and space. Zaointz also serves the
volume by framing it within accounts of the role of the ‘creative industries’
within neo-liberal economies; of the new, entrepreneurial ‘creative econ-
omy’ within creative city discourse; of ‘flexible-format’ productions adapt-
able to diverse festival and other contexts; of a new inter-imbrication of
festival performance, democratic assembly, urban-planning, and neigh-
bourhood development; and of an inspirational relationship between
festivals and large-scale social movements such as the Arab Spring and
the Occupy Movement.
Chapter , Alexandra Portmann’s ‘International Festivals, the Practice
of Co-production, and the Challenges for Documentation in a Digital
Age’, provides the reader-as-researcher with a very different context. Port-
mann makes the case that the increasing practice of festivals operating as
nodes in a network of co-commissioners and co-producers of new work,
the increasing prevalence and prominence of mobile, post-national artists
  
who create for international festival circuits rather than national audiences,
and the new role of digital technology in the marketing and archiving of
festivals have together posed new methodological challenges for festival
researchers. She argues that an approach, not through individual festivals
and their print archives, but through artists and dynamic festival networks,
enabled by techniques drawn from Digital Humanities scholarship and
theorized by actor-network theory and other new-materialist approaches,
would make visible the newly dominant conditions of production (includ-
ing labour) and provide a more solid basis than currently exists for research
on international festivals.
Chapter  in Part I, Marjana Johansson’s ‘City Festivals and Festival
Cities’, aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding the
relationships between festivals and urban space. In the course of doing so,
she explicates such concepts as ‘the experience economy’, ‘experiences-
capes’, and ‘place branding’ in ways that are helpful for coming to an
understanding of the complex social, cultural, artistic, and economic roles
of festivals within the historical and (especially) contemporary urban
environment, and in particular what she calls the tensions between revelry
and governance. The bulk of her chapter explores the ways in which the
festival is both produced by and productive of urban space, the ways in
which festivals can transgress or reinforce social stratifications inscribed in
urban landscapes, and the ways in which they can destabilize or reinforce
dominant identities and disrupt or reify established structures.
The first three contributions to Part I focus primarily on European
festivals, the scholarship on which dominates a field that considers them to
be foundational. My contribution, on ‘Indigenous Festivals’, bridges the
book’s two parts. Like the chapters in Part II, it surveys, selectively,
festivals from its sample group, which, however, exist as part of a trans-
Indigenous network rather than a geographical region. My chapter con-
cludes Part I, however, because it raises the question of how scholars of
theatre and performance festivals might differently understand interna-
tional festivals if they were to read them through a festival origin story that
is not the traditional European one. It briefly considers ceremonies and
events that precede European colonization in Australia and Turtle Island
and that might, from a Western perspective, be considered to be festivals,
before turning to contemporary Indigenous cultural and performance
festivals in various parts of the contemporary world that participate in
the performative resurgence of Indigenous cultures globally.
The chapters in Part II of this collection are intended at once to provide
selective coverage of the global festival circuit largely using case studies
 Introduction 
from the various regions under consideration. Authors were asked to
update work on the festival phenomenon, considering festivals within
the context of a newly globalized culture as at once participating in ‘place
myth’ marketing and serving as international and intercultural ‘contact
zones’ for negotiation, exchange, and the constitution of migratory and
diasporic identities. Part II begins with a reflection on the histories of
European festivals that echoes Keren Zaiontz opening chapter in Part I,
although it starts further back in time. Erika Fischer-Lichte’s ‘European
Festivals’ charts a trajectory from the Festival of Dionysus in ancient
Greece through Wagner’s Bayreuth and Hofmannsthall’s Salzburg and
the post-Second World War European festivals, to the  edition of
Theater der Welt in Hamburg, Germany, asking whether an international
theatre festival can still be a site for community-building and transforma-
tion, Her chapter focuses on Theater der Welt’s and its predecessors’
representations of cultural difference. The  iteration of the triennial
festival, in its negotiation of local community engagement with adaptable
‘global aesthetics’, sounds not unlike Zaiontz’s ‘second wave’.
Subsequent chapters focus primarily on contemporary festivals from
specific nations or regions. In Chapter , Jen Harvie presents an extended
case study of the massive Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts
festival and the leading model for fringes everywhere. Harvie weighs the
benefits against the significant risks of the Fringe’s free-market, open-
access policy, which, while providing a showcase for countless under-
recognized artists from around the world, also normalizes, disseminates,
and legitimizes, as she argues, an exploitative, unregulated ‘neoliberal
capitalist market ideology’. Her chapter ends with productive recommen-
dations towards constructing ‘a better fringe’ anywhere: investment in
infrastructure and in artists’ mental health, regulation of working condi-
tions, redress of conditions that lead to unequal access for under-
represented communities of artists and audiences, and a fortified and
globally disseminated overall ethos that privileges collaboration over
competition.
In Chapter , Carol Martin also focuses on a single festival, New York
Public Theatre’s ‘second-wave’ Under the Radar festival, timed to coincide
with the annual meeting of the Association of Performing Arts Profes-
sionals and four other New York festivals, thereby serving the profession as
a kind of global avant-garde performing arts marketplace. Martin discusses
the festival as at once transnational and also intensely part of its own
historic home in Astor Place and its legendary Greenwich Village neigh-
bourhood. A contradictory site of inclusions and exclusions, dedicated to a
  
progressive politics and experimental aesthetics but nevertheless participat-
ing in an inequitable neo-liberal global economy, Under the Radar is
quintessentially of New York City.
Sarah Thomasson moves the volume in Chapter  from a narrow focus
on a single festival to discuss a national network, ‘The Australian Festival
Network’, which, she argues, functions as that country’s de facto national
theatre, a decentralized, or ‘devolved’ site for the production, critique, and
exploration of cultural and national identities, Australian and otherwise.
She examines two shows featuring foundational national myths that toured
within this network, one of which also represented Australia at interna-
tional festivals abroad. Both productions, Thomasson argues, reflect Aus-
tralia’s national ‘unsettlement’, particularly around relations between
Aboriginal and settler communities, stories, and histories.
Khalid Amine also deals with a festival network, if a more loosely
connected one, and with the formation of what is in his case a
transnational Arab identity. In Chapter  he looks at ‘Theatre Festivals
in Post-Arab Spring Countries’ as ‘players in a turbulent public sphere in
the countries of Middle East and North Africa’, where theatre festivals
have always been at the heart of political struggle (and where political
struggle has always had festive and performative dimensions). Amine
surveys four major festivals in the Arab world today: the Cairo Interna-
tional Festival for Contemporary and Experimental Theatre (‘a largely
dissident festival funded by a mainly authoritarian state’), Journées théâ-
trales de Carthage (‘culture for all’, with a special focus on Africa), the Arab
Theatre Festival (strengthening intercultural ties within the Arab World),
and Performing Tangiers (performing ‘the interpenetration between place,
space, and memory’). He concludes that theatre festivals in the Arab world
are both instrumentalized to control dissent and ‘scenes whereupon
revolutionary praxis and detour are mapped’.
In Chapter , Julia Goldstein examines a different intraculturalism
within East Africa, one hosted and facilitated by the small Kampala
International Theatre Festival in Uganda, seeing it as an important site of
global exchange which, because of its smaller size and lower international
profile is more conducive to community-building and cultural exchange
than are many larger festivals. ‘It is a space’, she argues, ‘where cultural and
political work is carried out, simultaneously cultivating local, regional,
and global identities and strategic affiliations.’ The festival draws on
transnational relationships – including the support of the US-based Sun-
dance Foundation – to kick-start the rejuvenation of Ugandan and East
 Introduction 
African non-commercial theatre and its cultural, social, and political role in
the country and the region, nurturing young artists, promoting exchange,
cultivating post-colonial East African regionalism and connectedness across
linguistic and cultural differences, and exposing artists and audiences to
high-calibre local, regional, international, and transnational work.
Moving south, Loren Kruger examines in Chapter  the prestigious
National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa and its Fringe
through the lenses of ‘culture, economics, and race’. Kruger begins with
the festival’s troubled histories and legacies from colonialism to apartheid,
before moving through its cautious and somewhat reluctant transition to
more diverse ‘post-anti-apartheid’ and then to fully post-apartheid eco-
nomic and other difficult realities in the twenty-first century. The chapter
ends with a comparison of the  festival – the last under a white
director, who combined the roles of artistic and managing director – with
’s fortieth-anniversary festival, for which the roles of CEO and artistic
director were separate, marking the full professionalization of the organi-
zation and its ongoing attempts to balance ‘art for art’s sake’ against
difficult social and economic issues, as well as the pointedly local with
the national and transnational.
Hayana Kim’s contribution accepts in Chapter  the impossible task of
representing for this volume the vast continent of Asia and its extensive
festival landscape. Setting aside some of the élite Asian festivals best known
in the West as tourist destinations or sources or hosts of internationally
touring shows, Kim chooses two exceptional festivals as her case studies:
the first, BeSeTo, an inter-Asian collaboration among BEijing, SEoul, and
TOkyo, the capital cities of China, South Korea, and Japan, respectively;
and the second, the Gwangju Musical Arts Festival in Gwangju, Korea, a
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Crea-
tive City that in a  uprising played a key role in the rejection of
totalitarianism and advancement of democracy in the country. Both
festivals, Kim argues, intervene in what she considers to be the neglected
intercultural realm of the Sinosphere in the wake of double colonization,
first by Western imperial powers, and then by the Japanese after the Meiji
Restoration, who looked to Europe rather than Asia for their model of
modernization. Focusing on work from within the participating countries
rather than the global circuit, these festivals negotiate and redress difficult
and contested histories, memories, and identities within the region, and
cultivate Asian theatrical aesthetics based on Asian historical and cultural
specificities without placing them in relation to Western models.
  
Emily Sahakian also writes about a limited transnationalism, this time in
the context of France and its former colonies. In Chapter  she considers
‘Festivals in the Francophone World as Sites of Cultural Struggle’, con-
sidering the representation of France’s former colonies in Africa and the
Caribbean at France’s iconic Avignon Festival, at the International Festival
of Francophonies in Limousin, at a series of francophone festivals orga-
nized in New York by the Ubu Repertory Theatre, and at the Festival de
Fort-de-France in Martinique. At each of these, in varying and unequal
ways, she argues, transnational identities and affiliations are constructed
alongside aesthetic judgements within neo-liberal structures and
marketplaces shaped and conditioned by colonial histories and relations
that have denied to its colonies independent access to France’s own
presumptive ‘republican universalism’.
Jean Graham-Jones in Chapter  offers a comprehensive history and
overview of international theatre festivals in Latin America and then
focuses on two case studies: Festival Santiago a Mil and Festival Inter-
nacional de Buenos Aires, in the capital cities of Chile and Argentina,
respectively. Graham-Jones points in her analysis to tensions between the
international and local components of these festivals, to challenges around
the branding of each festival as they negotiate artistic missions against neo-
liberal funding models, and she proposes modes of co-operation among
festivals that might productively privilege local and national rather than
European standards and models.
As Graham-Jones notes, there are festivals of Latin American theatre
elsewhere in the world. One of the most intriguing of these, however,
focuses not on Latin America as such, but on the hemispheric reach of
Latinx and Indigenous theatre throughout the Americas. In the final
chapter of this Companion, Natalie Alvarez considers the small-scale inter-
national Panamerican ROUTES | RUTAS panamericanas, alternating
annually with the locally based CAMINOS festival, both produced by
Toronto’s Aluna Theatre in partnership with the Indigenous Native Earth
Performing Arts, not as a marketplace, but as a ‘theatrical commons
grounded in a heterogeneous and intercultural Americas’. Mapping the
roots of, and routes taken by, performances and participants at the RUTAS
festival, Alvarez articulates the crucial role that the festival plays in direct-
ing and redirecting transnational flows of knowledge and artistic produc-
tion in the Americas and establishing a genealogy of performance
traditions that flows South–North, beyond an Anglo-European tradition.
A volume such as this will always have its gaps, omissions, and blind
spots. There is little here, for example, about festivals on the Indian
 Introduction 
subcontinent, where one of the major élite festivals (the Delhi Interna-
tional Arts Festival) occurs in New Delhi and where, in the s, there
was a short-lived phenomenon called ‘Festivals of India’, which travelled to
the USA, the former Soviet Union, Japan, and Germany. This ‘festival
scene’ no longer exists, although there are hundreds of festivals across the
continent, mainly in rural areas, that, according to Rustom Bharucha, play
a diverse range of social, cultural, and religious roles but cannot with any
accuracy be considered to be ‘international theatre festivals’ in the terms of
this volume (‘Invitation’. Emails to Ric Knowles,  October  and
 February ). Also under-represented in these pages are many coun-
tries, particularly in Eastern Europe, Western Africa, and much of East
Asia whose most significant events are listed, along with those of the rest of
the world, in the Appendix. This volume, then, offers a start and a spur to
future research, which I hope will be prompted and inspired by the work
published here.

Notes
 For ‘festivalization’, see Bennett, Taylor, and Woodward; Ronström; Sala; and
Zherdev. For ‘creative city’, see Florida, Cities and Rise; and Zherdev. For
‘eventification’, see Hauptfleisch, ‘Festivals’.
 The Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen was also founded in  when a group of
actors from Hamburg gave a guest performance there in gratitude for the
miners there having saved their winter season by smuggling coal past the
military police to keep their theatres going. The festival has a major interna-
tional profile, but, unlike Edinburgh and Avignon, is organized around
annual themes (a playwright, a particular country) and has not had the same
influence on the international festival model as they have (see ‘Ruhrfestspiele
Theatre Festival’).
 For ‘festival cities’, see Thomasson and Johansson (Chapter ). For ‘the
creative class’, see Florida, Cities and Rise. For ‘the experience economy’, see
Pine and Gilmore.
 The estimate of  festivals is based on membership in World Fringe:
International Fringe Festival Association (www.worldfringe.com), but there
are many others. See also the World Fringe Alliance (www.worldfringe.com/
networks/wf-alliance/), the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals (https://
fringefestivals.com), and the United States Association of Fringe Festivals
(https://fringefestivals.us/).
 Grahamanstown recently merged with its neighbour Rini to form the
renamed city of Makhanda.
  
Contexts and Methods
  

From Post-War to ‘Second-Wave’

International Performing Arts Festivals*
Keren Zaiontz

The creation of international performing arts festivals in post-Second

World War (–) Europe is indivisible from the statecraft of
nations. In the aftermath of a war in no small part motored by spurious
attachments to blood and soil, the nation only solidified in importance.
The founding of international bodies such as the United Nations (UN)
in  further entrenched the nation-state as the legitimate power on
the world stage. International festivals attempted to repair and, to a
certain extent, repress the image of the nation as a generator of far-right
populism. The emphasis on ‘masterpieces’ was an attempt to swerve
towards more official, elite forms of nationalism, which also made claims
to universalism, and away from the kind of populist nationalism that
defined territorial sovereignty in terms of ethnic purity. It is hard to
fathom how a war that scorched European cities, displaced  million
people, and, for the first time in human history, caused more civilian
than military deaths worldwide did not lead to a wholesale re-evaluation
of nationhood. Instead, the festive celebration of the culture of nations
prevailed. Festivals performed the service of moral reassurance. In the
words of theatre director and former director of the Holland Festival Ivo
van Hove: ‘culture was needed to make sure that we were still human
beings, that we were going to resist violence’ (qtd in Zaiontz, ‘Every-
where’ ). While artists were enrolled to reassure publics about the
legitimacy of nations, political philosophers such as Hannah Arendt,
herself a German-Jewish refugee, advocated for a new politics that was
not organized around borders. In , in her preface to The Origins of
Totalitarianism she writes:
human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a
new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time
must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain
strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial
entities. (ix)


  
The new (post-national?) ‘entities’ envisioned here would guard against the
indignities that defined Arendt’s own experiences, namely detention and
displacement. Her conviction – that to be stateless is not only to be a
person without rights, but to lose the very right to be a person – resonates
throughout twentieth- and, now, twenty-first-century conflicts. And yet
the timing of her call for ‘a new political principle’, ‘a new guarantee’ on
‘human dignity’, conflicted with massive reconstruction efforts across
Europe. With events such as the Hungarian Revolution and Suez Crisis
(both in ) still on the horizon, the name of the game was political
stability and the rebuilding of relationships between nations.
Take an online tour of the ‘History’ pages of the most well-known post-
war festivals, all founded in , such as the Edinburgh International
Festival (EIF) in Scotland, the Festival d’Avignon in France, and the
Holland Festival in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. These festivals are
joined in a narrative of continental reunification. The EIF describes how
its ‘founding vision was to reunite people through great art . . . In these
historic early moments, people overcame the post-war darkness, division
and austerity in a blooming of Festival Spirit’ (‘The Festival Spirit’). And
the Holland Festival notes how its founding inaugurated an era of soft
diplomacy, one that ‘expressed the hope that staging national and inter-
national art could focus attention on international cooperation and
exchange’ (). The role of the arts was thus to ensure a happy revival of
‘territorial entities’ not their radical re-visioning.
Government interest in what was then called the cultural industries
meant that international festivals emerged in post-war nations as part of a
policy push to establish and grow arts and cultural institutions. This
emphasis on institution building began from the assumption that the state
has an arms-length role to play (largely through arts councils) in the
governance and, by extension, the production of the performing arts.
Post-war governmentality combined the system of the welfare state with
the ‘features upon which nations are built’, to borrow the words of Erin
Hurley, such as ‘soul, ethnicity, history, way of life, and a collective sense
of futurity’ (). When expressed as a marker of welfare rights, cultural
nationalism could be safely repackaged as part of the larger service model
of the cultural industries, and enshrined in mandates that variously
emphasized national identity, societal benefit, educational enrichment,
and the provision of arts and culture to communities outside the metro-
pole. Festival d’Avignon narrates its early years in Provence, the south-east
of France, in terms of such provision, and has no qualms about casting
itself as part of a larger evangelizing effort: ‘The theatre was given a new
 From Post-war to ‘Second-Wave’ 
lease of life thanks to the work of directors sent by the state on missions to
places [such as Avignon] then considered as cultural deserts’ (‘Origins –
–’). Not unlike traditional missionaries that carried the Good
News to colonized subjects in order to usher them – whether they liked it
or not – from darkness to light, theatre artists similarly brought the Word,
in the form of Shakespeare and Racine, to festival audiences. Post-war
festivals, like all worthy conversion efforts, attempted to advocate for a
better future: to prefigure societies whose collective faith in the arts rather
than the grievances that fuel fascism would give rise to a more peaceful era
between nations. We might bracket such proselytizing as a kind of prefig-
urative performance; performance that, to adapt activist and scholar Kamilla
Petrick’s phrasing to a theatrical context, sets out to ‘buil[d] a new society
in the shell of the old’ (). Perhaps because it was sun-baked into the
mission of international performing arts festivals, performances that pre-
figure social alternatives continue from the post-war to present. But while
festivals like Avignon sought to hierarchically enact an ‘enlightened’ era
through high-culture shows, the ‘second wave’ (s–present) of inter-
national performing arts festivals examined here prefigures a very different
kind of future – one that models new social relationships and artistic
processes that shift the event horizon around what constitutes a festival
performance. Charting the ‘second wave’ connects these festivals to larger,
systemic transformations from the cultural to creative industries, the rise of
the ‘creative city’, and the rupturing of successive progressive social move-
ments. Following these currents, this chapter links the imaginative realm
of site-specific, socially engaged work and the activist realm of movement
building to explore how new forms of relational play exceed the very time
of festival.

Creative Industries
As the paternalistic vision of state-supported artistic production receded, in
the s and s – part of a larger retrenchment of post-war welfare
rights – it was replaced by the creative industries. The creative industries
include the traditional sectors of the cultural industries as well as markedly
more commercial sectors such as digital media and communications,
architecture and design, advertising and marketing, and tourism and
heritage. In Europe and around the globe, post-industrial nations pushed
their publicly funded arts and cultural institutions into the domain of the
market and cemented a new era of neo-liberal governmentality. This is a
form of governance that is invested in the rhetoric of individual risk-taking
  
and uses this language to rationalize disinvestment in social services, to
glorify the realities of precarious labour, and to break-up traditional modes
of labour organization.
International performing arts festivals like other institutions became
invested, at the turn of the twenty-first century, in rebranding efforts that
demonstrated their alignment with these commercial ambitions. Organi-
zations adopted the language of risk in promotional materials, pursuing
corporate sponsorship, and allying themselves with the economic agendas
of their host municipalities. That entrepreneurial logic persists to this day
and finds its visual equivalent in advertising copy that emphasizes rugged
individualism. For example, Montreal’s Festival TransAmérique describes
its mandate as someone would a person: ‘ever and always the trailblazer’,
reads the banner across its website. The  programme featured a sepia-
tinted image of a frontiersman: an astronaut on the surface of the moon
standing beside a white flag that bears the festival’s initials, FTA. The
image of an astronaut is insightful for the ways it demonstrates how a
festival props up the ideology of market-inspired creativity through its
(implicitly colonial) embrace of the lone settler charting new terrain.
This era is also marked by what Sara Ahmed, in another context, calls
the ‘performance culture’ of documents () whose output is the marker of
a new type of public accountability. International performing arts festivals
now participate in the generation of plans, reports, or reviews whose
implied reader almost always appears to be a financial auditor rather than
a festival goer. For example, the EIF has a cache of downloadable Annual
Review files on their site dating between  and  that breaks down
sources of income and expenditure, includes infographics on audience
numbers and ticket sales, and provides line-by-line financial statements
(‘About the Organisation’). These documents are a genre in and of
themselves: numerical data is interspersed between glossy photos of festival
productions and streets brimming over with tourists and ticket holders.
The ‘performance culture’ enacted here demonstrates festivals’ financial
fitness and use-value to local and national economies.
It is against this contradictory backdrop of the ‘creative’ economy – of
risk-taking and solvency – that a new wave of smaller performing arts
festivals emerged in North America and Europe in the early days of the
new millennium. Based in urban cores, these artist-run festivals carved a
space apart from established, regional playhouses and non-juried, first
come, first serve, fringe festivals. In an interview with Joyce Rosario,
performing arts curator for the PuSh International Performing Arts Festi-
val in Vancouver, Canada, she describes how: ‘When you consider that
 From Post-war to ‘Second-Wave’ 
PuSh also came out of the same time period as T:BA [Time-Based Art
Festival] in Portland, Fusebox in Austin, Under the Radar in New York:
we’re all of a similar vintage, sharing a similar orientation, which I would
say is about the relevance of the festival in society today’ (qtd in Zaiontz,
‘Festival Sites’ ).
That desire for relevance often expressed itself through an attachment to
the city in which festivals took place. Even as PuSh, under its former
artistic and executive director Norman Armour, worked closely with
Rosario and others to programme national and international main stage
works, they consistently presented intimate performances that centred on
urban experiences. Survey any one of their programmes, particularly since
 when Vancouver hosted the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games
and, one year later, the city’s th anniversary. These festival editions are
replete with works in which spectators are guided through streets, ‘store-
fronts’, and ‘secret spaces’; participate as ‘percentiles’ in which they repre-
sent the demographics of Vancouver; set about on audio walks, or ‘site-
specific radio plays’ situated in and around Vancouver’s downtown core;
and are led to hidden corners of the Vancouver Public Library where they
sit across from locals to hear their life stories. These projects are created by
choreographers, directors, and theatre artists and yet the majority do not
take place in traditional performance venues. They move away from the
hierarchical tradition of creative and technical teams that design and
manage a production. And they demand an interpersonal (not to mention
physical) commitment on the part of audiences. In short, this new gener-
ation of festival works ducks past the theatre, its playhouses, production
crews, and, in some cases, even its actors.
The rich critical dialogue around works of the stripe I describe maps this
artistic production in relation to the circumvention and break down of
living-wage, defined benefit work. In Be Creative: Making a Living in the
New Cultural Industries, Angela McRobbie describes a new type of artist-
worker that ‘bypasses mainstream employment with its trade unions and
its tranches of welfare and protection in favour of the challenge and
excitement of being a creative entrepreneur’ (). And in Fair Play: Art,
Performance, and Neoliberalism, Jen Harvie describes a new type of spec-
tator whose material role in a performance (as a participant, walker, or
interlocutor) can ‘replicate, extend and potentitally naturalize exploitative
trends in contemporary labour markets more broadly’ (). These field-
defining texts are focused on the advent of neo-liberal regimes in the UK,
where the creative economy first gathered steam in the mid-s under the
then Labour government, and they respectively examine how ‘enterprise
  
culture’ made a virtue of self-management, from contract-based work to
participatory performance.
It is important to note that the site in which the scrappy individual
competes for a spot in an open concept office or storefront performance is
the creative city. This is a planning vision that found purchase among city
officials for the way it controversially positioned artists and other ‘creatives’
as engines of economic growth. At the forefront of this culturally led
agenda was Toronto-based economist and creative city guru Richard
Florida, whose  best-selling book, The Rise of the Creative Class, waxes
without irony about the benefits of labour predation: ‘Access to talented
and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron ore
was to steelmaking’ (). The artist-worker is, paradoxically, both part of a
‘creative class’ and caters to that elite, upwardly mobile group by fashion-
ing experiences that appeal to creatives’ quirky lifestyles and influencer
hashtags. Florida makes the case that, in essence, the future of post-
industrial cities hinges upon a class of people who can buy into gentrified
housing stock or consume the conceptual art and craft beer at street
festivals in those same districts as tourists. It is an ideology met with
censure by McRobbie, Harvie, and a legion of other critics who recoil
at the resourcing of artists, and are quick to point out that the precarity
‘creative entrepreneurs’ daily experience mitigates against the possibility of
living in the very inner cities they help to redevelop. Be Creative and Fair
Play belong to a school that seeks to question the inequalities that under-
pin decentralized, underpaid (low pay and no pay) work and play (and
work as play). The context, in sum, is labour, so festivals, if and when they
appear, are the background not the focus.

The ‘Second Wave’

The festival as footnote rather than focus is typical of how companies
that tour festival-ready, socially engaged works are often examined. I am
referring to the crop of companies that regularly develop participatory
works showcased in the ‘second-wave’ performing arts festivals that
Rosario mentioned, meeting a programming demand for works that
can be moulded to the spaces and stories embedded in the life a city.
Companies such as Rimini Protokoll (Berlin), Gob Squad (Nottingham
and Berlin), Blast Theory (Brighton), and Mammalian Diving Reflex
(Toronto) have adeptly developed transposable, participatory projects
situated in the public realm. These are not traditional touring produc-
tions so much as they are flexible formats and scenarios that can be
 From Post-war to ‘Second-Wave’ 
adapted, with the facilitation of artists, to the voices of a neighbourhood
or community. When some of these groups take the festival stage –
shooting a film about Berlin one hour before screening it to an audience
of Berliners, or bringing a group of local Singaporean seniors on stage to
talk about sex in front an audience of Singaporeans – they promise to
reveal something about the city to its citizens.
If you dip into the wide-ranging scholarship on these companies, the
festivals in which they perform matter in so far as they provide a context
for where they toured, how specific projects developed over time, and
what got adapted from one location to the next. Critical engagement has
also largely revolved around the ethics of collaborating with non-artists –
the demands to conform to scripted scenarios, intimate lines of inquiry,
aesthetic choices, and the narrative tropes of a given project (see Bishop;
Jackson). This has in turn resulted in a healthy scepticism of what is
being claimed about everyday lives (i.e., what it means to live in a city),
who gets cast (or qualifies) as ‘everyday people’, and what is legitimized
when ‘real’ people assume the stage. Socially engaged work moves
intriguingly between the micro and the macro – between participants
walking hand-in-hand down the street to hundreds of amateur dancers
moving in unison – emphasizing the authenticity of singular actions and
immaterial exchanges that, when combined, make up a collective event.
‘Second-wave’ international performing arts festivals often provide the
platform for this individualized collectivity. But squaring away the festi-
val as a holding place leaves aside how it has changed the imagination of
those institutions that produce and present such work. The details of
how, for example, Rimini Protokoll ceaselessly adapts the % City
project, staging the demographics of dozens of cities, are fairly well
understood. The path less tread is how has this project and others have
shaped the programming practices, the marketing strategies, and the very
missions of festivals. They are not simply responsive to but have left
their mark on those sites in which they perform.
The companies and artists committed to social practice have not only
fulfilled a demand for participatory works about the urban fabric, but, in
so doing, have arguably opened up new festival markets. Such program-
ming has not only informed the civic ethos of ‘second-wave’ festivals such
as PuSh and Fusebox, but led to commercial spin-offs and the rise of
performing arts festivals that, as Heather McLean succinctly puts it,
‘conflate culture with urban development priorities’ (Staging ). The
Luminato, Toronto Festival of Art, Cultural, and Creativity, epitomizes
this ideological imperative. In , the founders and CEOs, a trio of
  
influential business consultants and self-styled impresarios, directly
appealed to the Ontario provincial government for CA$ million in
operating funds over two years to start the festival, dodging the system
of adjudicated arts councils, and undermining the existing network of local
arts communities by presenting blockbuster, out-of-town productions.
In its inaugural year, Luminato CEOs also made an open-ended, multi-
million dollar deal with cosmetics giant L’Oréal, which joined as an
‘exclusive presenting partner’ (Adams). This partnership would not be
limited to plastering the logo on tents and in play bills, but, in the words
of L’Oréal’s former CEO Javier San Juan, ‘we’re going to partner in
providing ideas and even some artists’ (Adams). That emphasis on
corporate-inspired collaboration and interactivity became part of what
McLean describes as a ‘dizzying array of participatory work’ that resulted
in a ‘festival assemblage meant to re-stage the city’ (Staging ).
McLean and other critics have carefully tracked how Luminato –
emerging at the height of the ‘creative city’ planning thrall – manifested
a vision in which the built environment took a spectacular turn as low-
income neighbourhoods rapidly gentrified, real estate prices spiked, and
major institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario and Royal Ontario
Museum dramatically changed their facades, laying off core arts workers
to defray the costs. This real estate boom unfolded in the politically
divisive context of budget cuts to the federally funded Canada Council
for the Arts by the then Progressive Conservative government which also
levied eleventh hour cancelations on artist-led festivals such the Toronto
Summerworks Festival, which was notified that funding previously
awarded through the (non-arms-length) Department of Canadian Heri-
tage would be withdrawn on the eve of their  edition (Nestruck and
Dixon; Zaiontz, ‘Human Rights’). McLean’s extensive findings show
that the emphasis placed on ‘re-staging the city’ often resulted in skin-
deep socially interactive projects presented by Luminato. These included
high-profile events such as the quizzically named L’Oréal Paris Beauty
Tent, in which women formed lengthy queues at Yonge and Dundas
Square to receive free ‘five-minute makeovers’, literally remaking them-
selves in L’Oréal’s image with the aid of L’Oréal’s hair and cosmetic
products (Falcon).
There is also the more complex role that independent artists have played
in Luminato including those socially engaged companies noted earlier.
Rimini Protokoll, Blast Theory, Gob Squad, and Mammalian Diving
Reflex have all presented locally adaptable work at Luminato, but only
one of these companies is local to Toronto, and this sustained commitment
 From Post-war to ‘Second-Wave’ 
to the local played a role in realigning one of the festival’s programming
tracks around city dwellers rather than corporate sponsors. In ,
Mammalian Diving Reflex in collaboration with the art collective
Madeleine Co. and chef and food activist Joshna Maharaj took over
Luminato’s  Tastes of Toronto event. This was a popular food fair held
during the festival in Toronto’s revitalized Distillery District – with title
sponsorship by grocery, household, and financial giant President’s Choice –
that featured commercial vendors and President’s Choice’s own food
products. Mammalian Diving Reflex renamed it Future Tastes of Toronto:
At the Kids’ Table and drew upon the practices from its long-term residency
at Parkdale Public School in Toronto’s west-end neighbourhood by the
same name. The company also reconfigured a number of festival ready
formats including Eat the Street to create a piece that involved more than
one hundred children. Mammalian Diving Reflex is widely known for
facilitating social scenarios between adults and school children who are put
in positions of authority (e.g., stylist, guide, critic) that test assumptions
about young people’s competency through playful reversals of power. One
of the aims of this power reversal is to show minors to be more than grossly
inadequate or ‘immature’ versions of adults, and to open an intergenera-
tional dialogue through scenarios in which a different type of lateral
sociality between adults and kids might emerge. In At the Kids’ Table,
twenty local chefs led workshops with school children from grades four to
six over a six-week period, teaching them culinary skills and how to make
meals. The workshops culminated in the same food-fair type event at the
Distillery District, but this time the CA$ dishes doled out by the chefs
(who had set up food stations) involved a communal luncheon in which
customers ate their meals in the company of the school children who had,
by now, learned much about their respective chefs and how to make the
very meal the customers were eating.
From the outside, At the Kids’ Table sounds novel, but not that many
degrees removed from harnessing a creative consumption of the city. And
that resemblance to a playful but seemingly undemanding interactivity is
important. Mammalian Diving Reflex and Maharaj, especially, are
invested in working with populations in institutions, whether in schools,
hospitals, or performing arts festivals, and both have found respective
success in materially shifting how those sites function. That means
often assuming the discourses of those sites – taking up the language of
‘creativity’ or ‘balanced budgets’ – in an effort to change their social
composition. In this instance, they re-envisioned a crassly commercial
programming arm of Luminato, taking chefs that normally dish out food
  
to paying customers and redirecting that labour to educate and serve
children from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. The work also
prompted strangers and school children to talk to each other, a hallmark of
Mammalian Diving Reflex’s social art practice, in a festival overwhelm-
ingly defined by self-interested participation. And carrying on a conversa-
tion with a child that does not follow the usual patronizing, one-sided
repertoire of questions about a favourite teacher or favourite pet or
favourite colour is hard because it demands a different relational orienta-
tion to children, or what the company calls a ‘new social contract’. This
group of children in particular experienced first-hand the real estate boom,
which literally built over their existing neighbourhoods and master
planned new ones, making their presence as ‘young apprentices’ (qtd in
Forani) all that more important for the ways it made the Distillery District
a site that was as much theirs as that of tourists and well-heeled urbanites.
At the Kids’ Table was one of the first attempts by Luminato to contend
with their own omission at the heart of its festival – the local – whose
corporate-sponsored events throughout the city only seemed to further
nullify the local through its so-called celebrations of creativity. Companies
like Mammalian Diving Reflex deftly move between top-down events like
Luminato and artist-run performing arts festivals shifting the curatorial
priorities of both as they tour.

Collective Action
At the Kids’ Table shares much with those festivals, companies, events, and
networks committed to performing collectivities that extend beyond mar-
ketable representations of the city. Even if used for this purpose, the artist-
run ‘second wave’ was not formed to enhance the image of cities or speed
urban growth and revitalization. The city remains important – as do the
spatial possibilities that the city poses in terms of performance – but as a
location of democratic assembly, a site of performance research, and a
space of alternative solidarities. This is evident in the kinds of international
performing arts festival networks that have emerged in Europe over the last
two decades such as Festivals in Transition (FiT). FiT is a multifaceted
network of thirteen small and mid-sized international performing arts
festivals in Europe and Cairo, Egypt funded by the European Union’s
cultural industries programme, Creative Europe. The network is a model
for how festivals can partner beyond a single production and, interestingly,
collectively reassess how and what work is programmed, support emerging
festival curators, and collectively commission new work. Since , FiT