Festivalising!: Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture. (Themes in Theatre: Collective Approaches to Theatre & Performance)

Festivalising!

Themes in Theatre Collective Approaches to Theatre and Performance

3 Series Editor:

Peter G.F. Eversmann Editorial Board:

Temple Hauptfleisch Hans van Maanen Nicholas Ridout

Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture

Edited by

Temple Hauptfleisch, Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, Jacqueline Martin, Willmar Sauter, Henri Schoenmakers

IFTR/FIRT Theatrical Event Working Group

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

Official Publication of the International Federation for Theatre Research/ Publication officielle de la Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche Théâtrale Copyrights acknowledgement: Buch, David J. and Hanna Worthen. Ideology in Movement and Movement in Ideology. Theatre Journal 59:2 (2007), 215-239. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Cover photo: The Man explodes at Burning Man, Black Rock Desert in Nevada 2005. Photo by Wendy Clupper. Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2221-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands

The Editorial Committee would like to thank the following people for their immense help on this project: Edwin Hees (University of Stellenbosch) for editing the language of the final text Rikard Hoogland (Stockholm University) for help on the final editing and formatting of the layout for the final text

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CONTENTS Preface – festival cultures Jacqueline Martin

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Introduction – the festivalising process Vicki Ann Cremona

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PART ONE THEATRICAL EVENTS FESTIVALISED Festivals as theatrical events: building theories Willmar Sauter Festivals, theatrical events and communicative interactions Henri Schoenmakers Festivals as eventifying systems Temple Hauptfleisch

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PART TWO EVENTIFYING THEATRE FESTIVALS The theatricality of the Verona Opera Festival Linda Streit The Out-of-the-Box Festival of Early Childhood: fashioning the boutique festival for children Georgia Seffrin In search of the rainbow: The Little Karoo National Arts Festival and the search for cultural identity in South Africa Temple Hauptfleisch Playing politics at the Adelaide Festival Jacqueline Martin & Willmar Sauter Hybrid festivals. The Mickery Theatre: in search of A dramaturgy of fragmentation Henri Schoenmakers

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PART THREE THEATRE FESTIVALS AS NATIONAL EVENTS Ideology in movement and a movement in ideology: the Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 David J. Buch & Hana Worthen Iranian theatre festivalised Farah Yeganeh The Israeli National Community Theatre Festival, the real and the imagined Shulamith Lev-Aladgem The values of a festival – the Swedish Theatre Biennale Willmar Sauter

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PART FOUR FESTIVAL CULTURE AS THEATRICAL EVENTS Burning Man: festival culture in the United States – festival culture in a global perspective Wendy Clupper Community building within a festival frame – working-class celebrations in Germany 1918-33 Matthias Warstat Festivals in religious or spiritual contexts: examples from Japan, China, India and Bangladesh Christina Nygren The Feast of Saint Nicholas in the Low Countries Peter Eversmann Searching for Tennessee: performative identity and the theatrical event. Tennessee Williams/ New Orleans Literary Festival Carolyn Bain

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Abstracts

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Biographies

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PREFACE – FESTIVAL CULTURES

This book is the result of the second collaborative project undertaken by the Theatrical Event working group of the International Federation for Theatre Research and is a direct result of the ground-breaking work done in the first project, a study of the notion of the Theatrical Event and its application to drama, theatre and performance studies. The unique working procedures devised by the Working Group entails a genuine collaborative strategy, with the group meeting annually at the IFTR conferences to discuss and flesh out each participant’s contribution on a selected topic. This process eventually resulted in the publication of Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (Rodopi, 2004), a book in which a range of theoretical approaches to and examples are explored. The thematic focus for the second project undertaken by the group has been the natural result of a clear interest in carnival and festival culture displayed in the contributions of a number the participants in that book – including my own and my colleagues. It seemed logical, given the current international growth of and interest in festivals and festival culture, to apply the general principles explored in the first book to a study of that particular phenomenon in a global context. At further meetings in Jaipur and St Petersburg members of the Working Group were encouraged and stimulated to apply the Theatrical Event model to both current and historic festivals in their own countries. As a member of that Working Group and a co-editor of the first book, my own interest in this particular issue began, as often is the case, in working with a doctoral candidate at the Queensland University of Technology. Georgia Seffrin had taken Festival Culture as her research topic, for Arts festivals are not only a major component of Australia’s cultural development, but quite significant in the nation’s economic well-being. However research about Festival Culture is scarce, in spite of the indications that the number of cultural festivals of all kinds is growing. For these reasons I decided that we should engage in a collaborative research project with Willmar Sauter

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from Stockholm University, the convener of the IFTR Theatrical Event working group, whose publication about the developments into the socio-cultural nature of the ‘eventness’ of the Theatrical Event in The Theatrical Event. Dynamics of Performance and Perception (Univ. of Iowa Press, 2000) suggested a useful model with which to approach an analysis and evaluation of the festival. This model was to become a key theoretical premise for group’s work and for the ensuing publication Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (Amsterdam, Rodopi Press, 2004), in which some of our earlier results were reported. It was hoped that we could apply the new Theatrical Event model to a number of festivals. Sauter became a Visiting Research Fellow for four weeks in Feb/March 2002, where we held a seminar series under the auspices of QUT’s Creative Industries Research and Application’s Centre (CIRAC) in Brisbane. As a means of testing out the application of Sauter’s model we attended the Adelaide Festival, doing field work which included audience surveys, interviews with key administrators, performance analyses and investigations regarding processes for funding and structuring the festival before returning to QUT where we disseminated the material gathered in Adelaide. Meanwhile Georgia Seffrin also had the good fortune to be able to attend the various meetings of the IFTR Working Group and, like all the other participants, was enabled to sharpen her ideas and broaden her horizons by participating in the discussions. In her turn she could also share in and contribute to the process of shaping the IFTR Working Group project. The fruits of this latest process of collaboration are to be found in this book, where the Adelaide Festivals of 2002 and 2004 are examined closely, and in the contribution by Georgia Seffrin, whose interest boutique festivals has led to the completion of her doctoral thesis on the subject. As could be expected, the Theatrical Event model has passed through a number of evolutionary stages before arriving at its present form as applied in this book. Willmar Sauter’s introduction on the ensuing pages ‘Festivals as Theatrical Events: Building Theories’ traces this process in detail, while much of the theory evolved is reflected in the writing of the various participants. As a supervisor of a PhD student, I have personally found this way of working stimulating for myself and for my student, and as the

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editorial team gathered in Stockholm in the cold and dark in January, 2005 where the fruits of the Working Group were awaiting discussion, I reflected that this was a most rewarding and satisfying way of undertaking research. Jacqueline Martin

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INTRODUCTION – THE FESTIVALISING PROCESS VICKI ANN CREMONA

The reader of this book is presented with the considerable diversity and wealth of festival culture. The festivals discussed, though representing only a tiny microcosm of all those organised around the planet, constitute an ‘ensemble’ that is fairly representative of the infinite variety of celebrations that make up what Hauptfleisch calls the ‘polysystemic’ nature of this type of theatrical event. The foregrounding principle of any festival is the wide range of aesthetic and artistic possibilities it offers. It is this possibility of selection that makes attendance at a festival different from going to a single performative experience, because even if persons decide to attend simply one event, they are aware of the variety of other possibilities that they deliberately choose to ignore. As Schoenmakers points out, the more events festival attendees take part in, the more they shift from being theatregoers to becoming festival participants, developing and integrating their different experiences into the experience of the festival as a whole. In each of the chapters the authors have shown ways of apprehending the different theatrical realities by examining the individual processes at work within each. My aim in this introduction is focus the idea of ‘festivalising’ that is embodied in the very title of this book, through a review of the various systems that the authors have identified as constituting the building and binding factors of this type of theatrical event. I am not here concerned so much with the detailed organisational aspects of a festival, although elements such as length, time, price and advertising certainly come to feature in any analysis of a festival event and have, to a greater or lesser extent, been touched upon by the various authors. What I would like to provide an introductory discussion of what appears to me to be three key factors that occur throughout the discussions to follow and have a particular impact on the notion of festivals and festivalising. POWER As the various authors clearly show, a festival is a public event that is inserted into a particular cultural context which bestows upon it the

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qualities by which it is perceived and identified. In certain cultural contexts, such as South Africa or Iran, festivals play a dominant role in the theatre culture of the country. The relationship between the type of playing culture that contributes to the creation of the event and the cultural context into which it is inserted is fundamental to the festivalising process itself. As Sauter’s chart on p. 216 clearly shows, this relationship can become a vehicle for the wider context of power structures, and positions the festival vis-à-vis the type of political context it emerges from. The two German historical examples discussed amply demonstrate this. On the one hand, we witness the playing culture of German socialism, which through the creation of the Volksbühne, gave rise to an interest in theatre performance among the workers, which in turn led to the staging of “ArbeiterMassenspiel” (participatory plays for the masses) which were inserted into a celebratory context developed, initially at least, for the workers’ leisure. On the other, we see how the highly rigid political structures of the Nazi regime imposed a certain type of playing culture that gave primacy to one type of race, to the exclusion of all others, and how the predominant ‘Aryan’ context had a determining influence on the type of artistic choices that were made – but also on the ways in which the festivalising process integrated certain deviations into the politically imposed norms by taking into account artistic, rather than political, considerations that the context itself tolerated. Certainly, one of the main processes of festivalising is to provide quantity, as well as diversity, even within the same type of performance genre. As Schoenmakers points out in the first section (Theatrical events festivalised), the festival can be seen as a metaevent, encompassing a series of single events that are linked by various factors. The most apparent links are certainly the name and theme chosen for the festival, two factors – especially the latter – that play a determining role in the artistic shaping of the event. I term these the ‘festival labels’, which announce the intentions as well as the identity the festival chooses for itself. These labels are particularly relevant to the context of ‘theatrical playing’ as they not only play an important role in the creation or selection of the performances themselves, but also in the type of encounter between artist and spectator, as well as the type of spectator who will be attracted to the festival. Another label attached to the festival is the programme itself (in which volume and clarity play a preponderant role) and the

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‘programme notes’, where the ‘meanings’ of the festival, or at least those perceived by the artistic director, are communicated to the public at large. The artistic director, who often is the one to choose the theme, is fundamental to the festivalising process as his/her input may effectively mark not only the selection and choice of performances, but also the way they are shown as well as establish the ways they are to be apprehended. A number of chapters focus on and outline the importance of key figures such as Rudolf Laban, Yossi Alfi or Susan Richer in the festivals they headed. A case in point is the discussion of Peter Sellars’s impact as artistic director of the Adelaide Festival, for it drives home the extent to which the choice of artistic director, and the selected theme, may have a decisive outcome on the nature and quality of the performances that are put up. This example also illustrates the importance of relationship between the artistic director, who is the person that the public identifies as being responsible for the type of communication processes that the festival engages with, and the organisers, whose role is to steer the festival within the contextual theatricality of which it is part. The identity and intentions of the organiser play an essential role in the shaping of the festival event. A state organisation can obtain institutional recognition more easily and this can be a deciding factor with regard to the festival’s budget – a state-run festival has different targets and capacities than one run on the more meagre budget of a particular theatre or theatre-maker. In the case of the New Orleans Literary Festival, money (or the lack of it) is at the core of the festival’s very existence, indeed it was created as a new source of income for the city’s depleted finances. The size of the budget, and the fact of accepting or refusing state aid, are therefore important elements in the shaping processes of a festival. The organisers’ intentions can vary widely from a purely commercial scope to more social perspective such as that of allowing a community to reflect its identity, to attain recognition, or even to juxtapose itself to the prevailing culture in order to strengthen or confront it. On a financial level, this can be reflected in the pricing policy adopted by a festival, which can play an important role in attracting or repulsing particular sectors of society. The size and importance of a festival play a decisive role in determining the economic effects of the festival on the surrounding area – as festival examples such as Verona, New Orleans or South Africa amply show. The success of a festival can render that

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particular celebration a benchmark for other celebrations of the same kind. PEOPLE The festivalising process is very heavily determined by its dimensions (national, regional or local), the type of productions to be shown, and the type of audience(s) it sets out to attract. The spatial dimension of the festival is an essential factor, as it assumes liminal qualities of celebration. A theatre building in the heart of a city that contains the festival within itself pre-determines a very different kind of celebration to one that is held in sprawling grounds covering a specially designated area that is transformed or even made alive for the space of festival. The visibility of a festival is similarly determined by the extent to which it ‘spills out’ onto the community and communal areas that surround its space. Although the Verona festival is confined to the space of the arena, a series of factors, including the huge props in the street, render it visible to all those within the city. In the case of the theatre building, the site itself can actually contribute to the opaqueness of the festival for the city’s inhabitants. The specialist nature of the festival in Uppsala, as well as the fact that it is limited to the city theatre and atrium, renders it practically unnoticeable to the people living in the city. The same can be said for the community festival in Tel-Aviv where, in an effort to attract more people, Alfi chose diversification of activities by introducing an exhibition, the launching of which was timed with the festival. Multi-space festivals engender a whole range of activities besides the actual performances themselves, and in all cases, areas for meeting, discussion and relaxation, appear as essential to a festival culture. The oriental ritual festivals occupy various places, from the streets to makeshift sites for spectatorship, such as moveable stages or tents, and may also include spaces for relaxation. Nygren mentions the tatami room with reference to a particular Japanese Matsuri where the Yamanomura chat and drink. This socialising aspect is perhaps even more apparent than in the case of the Burning Man festival discussed by Clupper, where bars, lounges and particularly air-conditioned meeting places – that within the American context may be seen as signs of a developed bourgeois society – are set up within the apparently anarchic celebratory structure of the festival situated in the hot, barren desert.

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These choices determining the space and organisation of the event are essential components in the programming and general appeal of the festival. In the case of the Community Arts Festival in Tel-Aviv, a montage of various productions creates a particular performative process which, though intended to whet the appetite of spectators and encourage them to go and watch the individual performances, creates a sort of meta-performance in itself. International festivals such as the Verona Opera Festival thrive on bringing people from all over the world to the city, and in this case, a heavy emphasis is placed on spectacular stagings and the celebrity of the artists. Other festivals such as the International Fajr Theatre Festival in Iran, or the Festival of the Arts in Adelaide, include an international component, thereby providing a possibility for national or local citizens to witness productions coming from other countries. In the case of the Mickery Theatre, the artistic director Ten Cate created a hybrid festivalising process within his normal theatre programming that contributed more extensively to his aim of introducing Dutch audiences to the innovative theatre that was being produced elsewhere. Although various festivals are conceived to show performances that have attained some success, certain festivals, such as those in Iran, encourage the production of new plays. As Yeganeh indicate, in this type of system the festival becomes a launching pad for productions which the companies can then tour with. Buch and Worthen go further in showing how the intended touring factor was an intrinsic part of the spectacle of performances shown at the Tanzfestspiele in 1934 as these were intended to transmit German Culture, alias Nazi values, both at home and abroad. Within this context, the ‘judging’ factor is very important, as plays which have won prizes or earned a public mention are perceived as ‘successful’ and will therefore attract interest and attendance more easily. Particular festivals target specific audiences, and in some cases, such as that described by Seffrin, the aim of the festival is not simply to show, but to involve the persons attending in the creative process itself. In the case of the Out-of-the-Box Festival of Early Childhood, this type of involvement, which aimed at empowering the targeted audience of children, formed an intrinsic part of the of the festival’s raison d’être. In other cases, space for creativity is often provided through the workshops offered, just as space for reflection on the theatrical processes witnessed by the spectators can be found in the

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discussions and seminars that a festival may allow. In this context, it is interesting to note that the elimination of any form of presentation or discussion in the 1934 Tanzfestspiele was symptomatic of the totalitarian regime that controlled the festival, whereas in cases such as the 2002 Adelaide festival, the theme itself contributed the national discussion that had already been initiated about the status and acceptance of indigenous Australians, enhancing Australia’s democratic image and values. COMMUNITY These and other festivalising qualities determine, but are also determined by, the type of spectator who attends the specific type of festival. In fact, this particular type of theatrical event (like others) gives rise to a particular community which defines, or at least recognises itself, in the very act of attendance of the event. Attending a particular festival is in itself a meaningful act, even though the persons who make this choice are not necessarily aware of all or any of its political and social implications. In festivals that I have termed as hierarchically determined, spectators go ‘to see and be seen’, as recognition of one’s participation in a festival bestows status. Streit’s discussion of the hierarchical nature of the attendees of the Verona festival which, as in other cases, is reflected in the cost and quality of the seating, as well as in the attire of the occupiers, is a pertinent example of the distinction between one spectator and another. As we have seen, often the process of hierarchy is elaborated in function of aesthetic or intellectual appeal. It has been shown how certain festivals, such as the Swedish biennale, are organised only for an elite whose very presence at the festival confirms their status in the eyes of their co-elite members. Generally, high-budget events try to attract people from other geographical areas, and in order to do this, certain attraction processes such as big names and renowned performances are foregrounded in the organisation of the event. The hierarchical type of festival does not usually envisage any participatory processes in the performances themselves; these are introduced in discussions or workshops which, as Sauter points out, can provide an added dimension to the recognition of the spectator’s status. The processes at work in this type of event are very different to those that aim to create a theatrical event where not only certain sectors, but the whole community participating in the festival, identify

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themselves as a single homogeneous group, and by this process is, as Lev-Alagdem indicates, transformed into a temporary ‘communitas’. This type of festival goes far beyond purely commercial aims, and often seeks out to ‘eventify’ salient aspects of the life of a particular society, or to celebrate the culture, beliefs or value system which distinguish it from other societies. Warstat shows how the festivalising process in working-class celebrations in Germany after World War I was aimed at inducing a community framework, in order to secure adhesion by conferring a sense of belonging. In this type of process the force and emotional nature of the social interaction is such that there is generally more direct participation of the audience in the festival activity, and in certain cases, the distinction between spectator and participant is very tenuous, if not totally eliminated. Identification with the ‘communitas’ can be brought on by various factors, such as the participants’ origin, which provides a common cultural idiom. In the Burning Man festival participants were mainly Caucasian, and it has been shown how the Little Karoo National Arts Festival in South Africa is a celebration of Afrikaans identity, with nostalgic overtones. This particular quality foregrounds elements associated with the specific identity, consequently the festivalising process in the South African festival focuses on the verbal aspect of the productions, which is a way of reaffirming and regenerating interest in the language and the culture behind it. Identification can also be brought about by a shared common interest, as in the case of the Israeli community theatre festival; however, this process can also be further exploited to tackle issues of social empowerment or even ‘malaise’ such as Martin and Sauter indicate in the case of the reconciliation theme chosen by Sellars. Identification and (re-)construction of a particular group can make it very difficult to attract and integrate persons who do not belong (or do not feel they belong) to the group, and in the case of the Burning Man new participants are helped through a process of initiation in order for them to then proceed to another, that of transformation, which constitutes one of the festival’s basic components. In this case, the festivalising process takes on a ritualistic dimension that is exploited even more deeply in spiritual celebrations, such as the ones that take place in the Orient. Nygren has shown how in the Chinese ‘jieri’, the deities themselves become part of the celebrating community, and both men and gods switch roles from

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watchers to participants, and back to watchers. As the author points out, in this case a process is constructed whereby the borders between reality and fantasy become almost indiscernible. I see this as the ‘flow’ which Schoenmakers refers to in his description of the emotional experience, and it can be extended to the very process of celebration of the identified ‘communitas’, for it is so potent that it can deal with those elements affecting the spiritual and temporal life of the community itself that cannot be dominated by human force or will alone. Although the process of altered behaviour is inherent in the theatrical act, as can be seen in Bain’s descriptions of the stagings of the famous line from Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar named Desire, it is often witnessed in festivals involving ‘communitas’ as participants pass from an ‘ordinary’ to an ‘extra-ordinary’ dimension. Clupper shows how transformed appearance and behaviour are at the core of the Burning Man festival, Hauptfleisch describes a change of behaviour in the Afrikaans audiences, and Nygren illustrates examples of altered behaviour that are induced by other processes such as trance, with the resulting systems of risk-taking that ensue. Both Bain’s and Eversmann’s examples of altered behaviour show that this process can also be at the root of another: that of a rite of passage – where in one case, the participant quits and rejoins the community, and in the other, moves from ignorance to knowledge. Reflecting on the structures at play within a festival, new questions regarding the festivalising process come to mind. W.R. Bion, famed for his pioneering work into group processes, once stated: “When two characters or personalities meet, an emotional storm is created”.1 On an emotional level, all theatrical events are experiences that touch our core selves. What, then, are the processes at work when hundreds or thousands of people get together within the celebratory structure of the festival that constitutes a focal event grouping a number of these theatrical events? How does one analyse the emotional, aesthetic and psychological effects on the individual participating in this type of mass gathering? Can the here-and-now experience of the festival event, through the various activities which engage the participant in play, counterbalance the mediated experience of the diverse possibilities generated by the media, especially television, and now the internet?

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Given the polystemic nature of the festival event, it is certainly not possible to penetrate all the processes at play within the event itself, or the myriad of ways it is apprehended by its audiences. Though many of these issues are raised by the authors, the totality of these issues naturally lie beyond the scope of a single book, and indeed some of it may lie beyond the parameters of the theatrical event project. Yet the book does touch on and demonstrate much of the complexity and fascination of the festival as theatrical event, and will, I hope, raise as many questions and provide as many answers for you as it did for me.

NOTES 1

Bion, W.R. (1979) ‘Making the best of a bad job’, unpublished lecture to the British Psycho-Analytical Society.

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PART ONE THEATRICAL EVENTS FESTIVALISED

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FESTIVALS AS THEATRICAL EVENTS: BUILDING THEORIES WILLMAR SAUTER

The blackboard was a central point of interest at all meetings of the Theatrical Event working group. During our lively discussions, sooner or later one of the participants grabbed a piece of chalk and started to draw. Circles, stars, diamonds took shape and were completed with key words, which were rapidly substituted by alternative ones. In this way, theoretical models of the theatrical event were created, revised and changed. In this introductory section I would like to present some of the models which have become important tools in the theoretical framing of the group’s work on festivals as theatrical events. Our point of departure was the theoretical model constructed in the chapter on ‘Theatrical actions and reactions’ in the book Understanding Theatre (Martin & Sauter 1995). Jacqueline Martin and I attempted to visualise the communicative levels between the performer and the spectator. We had discarded the traditional sender – message – receiver model, because we considered theatrical communication as being mutual: as much as the performer is under the impression of the audience, so the spectators react to the actions on stage. A problem that we only could solve provisionally at the time concerned the relationship between the performer-spectator communication, on the one hand, and the context in which it takes place, on the other hand. There is no need to argue that theatrical styles, genres, organisational structures and cultural conventions determine both the expressive forms of a performance and its possible content. We decided to distinguish between five particular contexts, which we called conventional, structural, conceptual, cultural and life world. As this brief enumeration of the five contexts indicates, there were some problems to be solved. First of all, although this was not the intention, it was difficult to avoid a hierarchic order between these contexts. Another problem concerns the fact – in our view – that these contexts were equally important and relevant for the presentation on stage and the perception in the auditorium. We needed to visualise that both stage and auditorium were framed by the same contexts. The

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model could also be used to explain situations in which the contexts are not shared, such as guest performances from far-away countries or a genre which is entirely new to certain spectators. This applies especially to international festivals. A third problem constituted the time frame of the contexts. It was obvious to us that the contexts did not merely represent a vague background that becomes irrelevant once the show has started. On the contrary, these contexts are activated by the theatrical encounter and are of great importance for the course of the communicative exchange between stage and auditorium. But how could this temporal dimension be represented in the model? It remained a simple time arrow, no more than indicating that these contexts remain active over time. In other words, the model of the theatrical event as developed in 1995 had some disadvantages, but it nevertheless rendered visually some basic features which we thought were represented in a fairly convincing way. During one of the working group’s meetings, which took place in Amsterdam, half of the participants were standing in front of the blackboard, while the other half, still seated, were shouting various suggestions. The board there was covered with concentric circles or rather ellipses, which were filled with words. The discussion had entered a phase in which the context of the theatrical event was no longer considered as something that could be added from the outside, but the event needed to be seen as one whole construction. The performative encounter was the innermost circle, embedded in three circles of relevant contexts. Whilst writing an introduction to the book we were preparing in the working group, I realised that, although I still had in mind the three main circles of communication, organisation and legislation, something was missing. Theatrical activities are a kind of playing, which many languages also reflect: we play in the theatre, we play a role, and what is performed is called a play. It occurred to me that theatre is part of a playing culture and that many other playful activities, performative or not, can be seen as the network in which theatrical playing has its place. FESTIVALS AS THEATRICAL EVENTS A theatrical event is not only the encounter between a performance and its audience in a given place at a certain time, but includes also the complexities of the society in which it takes place. A theatrical

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event does not happen in a vacuum, but is closely related to such factors as aesthetics, the economy, education, attitudes, status, traditions, etc. To analyse this complex system of long-term influences and short-term effects, the theatrical event is conceptualised through four basic aspects. An extended presentation of this concept is to be found in my introduction to the book Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (Sauter 2004, pp. 314) resulting from the contributions of an IFTR Working Group.

The same arguments will be used in part here, but the purpose of the following is mainly to extend these aspects of the theatrical event to the scale of an entire festival. Playing culture positions the theatrical event in opposition to written culture. The logocentric tradition in Western civilisations is very strong and has dominated much of our cultural identity since the Renaissance. Playing culture as a mode of expression, through which a society communicates its value system, relates the theatrical event to a wide range of activities. As a non-literary art form, it corresponds closely with film and other moving images, visual arts, dance, music, etc. It is also firmly related to other forms of playing, such as sports, games, races and other more or less serious competitions. Theatrical events are at the same time cultural performances in the sense in which Milton Singer has used this term: weddings, funerals, processions, parades, political rallies. The playing culture contains typically strong physical elements, which have to be learned by doing,

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i.e. they are often handed down from one generation to another, for instance the art of acting. This physical know-how passes from one player to another as a form of tacit knowledge. It is well known that the art of drama has been described again and again since the time of Aristotle, whereas instructions for actors have rarely been written down. Playing culture is not easily controlled by authorities and can therefore be used for subversive purposes. Cabarets and carnivals are good examples of the subversive potential of playing culture. At the same time, theatrical events also can be used and misused for celebratory purposes, such as opening ceremonies or royal entries. During a festival the playing culture receives more attention than usual: the playing is directly focused upon through the concentration of activities. The degree of this concentration depends strongly on the ‘density’ of a festival, i.e. the location, duration and frequency of festival events. The Wagner Festspiele in Bayreuth are concentrated on one specific theatre, the Biennale of Swedish theatre takes no more than four days to present about ten of the country’s ‘best of the year’ performances. It is an assumption that the density of a festival carries significance for the spectators’ experience as a heightened state of participation and feelings of ‘communitas’. A useful term in this connection is Michael Czikscentmihaly’s notion of ‘flow’, by which he describes a high degree of concentration, which keeps disturbances away and enables doctors to operate on patients for hours, people to walk in the mountains for days, or patrons to enjoy arts festivals (Czikscentmihaly 1992). The cultural context describes the societal frames of the theatrical event, namely the socio-political environment in which it is taking place. This also concerns the decisive role of economics in cultural events. The significance of public subsidies and private sponsorships can hardly be overestimated, but also less hard-currency matters like the reputation of board members, the political aims of dominant parties, and the engagement of the media are all important for the well-being of the cultural sector. These are well-known issues and need not be detailed here. The question is whether there are specific circumstances which influence festivals as events? In favourable cases the participants of a festival recognise each other as participants and develop a group identity or a group feeling, start to interact and thus enhance the experience of the event. Such changes in attitudes, which are rarely noticeable in regular

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performances, probably need certain conditions to evolve. Such conditions are carefully studied in the following chapters. Another effect, that of the festival having a positive influence on the city where it takes place, also deserves to be studied more closely: the short-term effects such as higher turnouts for the tourist industry as well as longterm effects for the reputation and self-esteem of the city. In other words: how do festivals transfer the economic investments into other values, both for the participants and for the region? What are these values and why are the investments made? To study the cultural context of a festival city, a number of areas have to be surveyed. Power structures – on formal, informal and real levels – have to be analysed, including arts councils, lobby groups, potential and actual sponsors, etc. At least the official policy documents have to be secured, depending on the public access guaranteed by society. The informal deliberations which precede formal decisions might be difficult to gain insight into. The media play a potent role in most policy-making and constitute a major source for the study of cultural contexts. Certain media will also provide information on the informal channels of power and influence; however, this needs to be treated with care. Party interests or editors’ personal views can easily distort other opinions. Also the demographics of the area, its class, ethnic, religious and gender structures have to be taken into account to give a fair picture of the cultural context. The circumstances of a festival as well as the interests of the researcher are, in the end, decisive for the overview of this aspect. Contextual theatricality refers to the conditions under which a theatrical event takes place. Such conditions are the aesthetic conventions, the division of genres, the locations, the organisational traditions, equity rights, legal conditions, etc. One could say that it includes all structures related to theatrical production, except their presentation on stage. In addition, the conventions, expectations, habits and economy of the potential audiences also belong to the sphere of contextual theatricality. In a festival there is normally a narrower selection of genres or types of theatre than during the all-year-round repertory. The festival shows productions which are thought to be exceptional or which have been commissioned especially for the occasion. Some festivals concentrate on a certain genre like opera, others on avant-garde works,

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which today often transgress the limitations of genres. The benefits of a festival might not only remain with the spectators, but can also affect the professional norms of the creators. Inspiration, expansion, renewal are challenges which the professionals might experience while encountering the works of their colleagues. Most festivals strive for specific concepts, which are proclaimed in printed programmes and leaflets and repeated in press releases and marketing material. Such proclamations have to be compared with the actual outcome of the programme, i.e. intentions have to be proved in practice. Also the audiences should be included in these studies. The composition in terms of the demographics of an audience is easily accounted for, but more sophisticated methods are available to investigate audience members’ cultural habits, special interests and general attitudes, economic possibilities of buying tickets as well as personal tastes and preferences. There are, however, other types of festivals to be considered. In non-professional or religiously orientated festivals – presented in this book – other values are at stake, which considerably change the outlook on festivals. Market economy as well as aesthetic prestige are here irrelevant and substituted by emotions of community and inclusion – but also the risk of exclusion. A special field of interest constitutes the future development of arts festivals. Organisers would very much like to know how the new media can be made use of, not only as tools for administration as is the case today, but also as ingredients in artistic processes. Of course, such developments are not foreseeable, but information on the latest trends might prove helpful to festival directors. An observation we made is the increasing mixture of media and the fragmented dramaturgy, which we will comment upon in the chapter on the Adelaide festivals. Performance as art form, including nearly all available technical and visual effects, seems to have become a dominating element in festivals, but only a broad, international survey can point out probable future directions. Theatrical playing, finally, designates the actual encounter between performer and spectator. This encounter is mutual and thus requires the simultaneous presence of both. Theatrical playing can best be described as communicative process, through which all the other aspects of the theatrical event concentrate for the time of the

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performance. The here-and-now experience is paramount for both performer and spectator. This communicative encounter between performer and spectator can be described as an interaction which occurs on several levels. The performer is at the same time exhibiting his/her personality, displaying his/her artistic skills, and creating his/her symbolic figure. Personality, artistry and figure reach the spectator through the levels of sensory, artistic and symbolic communication. The spectator reacts to the actions of the performer both emotionally and intellectually, through intuitive and cognitive processes, which continue through the entire performance. The spectator’s attention towards the performer as a person – with physical features as well as temperament, state of mind and presence – proves to be decisive for the building up of a successful communicative relationship. The spectator’s appreciation of the actor’s style and skills is a source of inspiration for his/her performance on stage. On the symbolic level, the spectator interprets the embodied actions of the performer: together they create a fictional figure. How, then, is it possible to expand the experience of the theatrical event to a whole festival? There are several factors to be considered. A festival can create an atmosphere of playing culture, which invites and stimulates the visitor to look for theatrical experiences even outside the conventional venues. Often special areas for post-performance meetings are created to open up spaces for encounters between performers and spectators, but also for informal meetings between artists and with other members of the public. The thematic focus of a festival can create a sense of coherence of the kind we experienced in Adelaide with regard to the reconciliation issue. One can also mention the continuity between the performances and other activities, the emotional and intellectual challenges, the detachment from regular everyday-life, etc. VALUES, IDENTITIES, HISTORY One of the most striking features of this Theatrical Event model is the transformation of values that characterises the four elements as they move from one point to another. In an ideal situation, politicians take decisions to financially support a festival organisation. The expectations are, however, not of an economic kind, but rather strategic in relation to certain cultural effects: the organisers of that

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festival are supposed to produce performances with aesthetic, moral, educational or other values. Given that the artistic directors succeed in doing so, they satisfy both the performers, who get paid for it, and the spectators, who pay money for the tickets. Hopefully the audience’s experience ‘pays off’ in terms of their economic investment, but at the same time the spectators also become engaged in a collective process that might enhance their feeling of identity and make them feel part of a larger community. Thus participating in the playing culture, they lend status to the theatre they visit and become a powerful argument for the politicians to continue their support for the festival organisation in question and, in the best of cases, for cultural purposes in general. The model does not indicate a number of circumstances which are highly influential, but not immediately visible. I use the term identities to underline such factors as class and age, ethnicity and religion, gender and sexuality. These identities change the whole picture of a festival event. The conditions for establishing theatrical events for young children, a group of immigrants, as therapy for the unemployed, in a gay club and so on, are significantly different from those of a regular city theatre or a commercial stage. These identities affect not only one or two elements of the model, but can completely change the overall pattern of the theatrical event. In other words: identities always need to be taken into consideration, be it mainstream or subcultures. This model of the festival event lacks a historical dimension. Every aspect of a festival has its history. To what extent the historical circumstances and changes affect the here-and-now experience can be investigated and analysed. Right now we realize that the playing culture is rapidly changing due to the advent of electronic media. So far, these changes have been observed in cultural politics, but they have had little impact on the structures of theatre organisations. The position of theatre as an influential contributor to public opinion has most likely been weakened, compared to the 1970s. Its central function as an entertainment facilitator, which theatre held a hundred years ago, is not self-evident in the twenty-first century. The historical aspects are a necessary complement to all the elements of the theatrical event model. The working group has now undertaken studies of festivals of the most varying kind in the assumption that festivals can be

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understood as theatrical events, or, as Henri Schoenmakers argues in the next chapter, as meta-events. New models and variations of the models mentioned above have been used to investigate the festival culture in general as well as particular historical and contemporary festivals. In this way, these studies of festivals will contribute to the understanding of one of the dominating organisational forms of theatrical presentations – seen historically – and at the same time advance our insight into the theatre as event. _________________________ REFERENCES Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1992) Flow: The Psychology of Happiness. London, Sydney, Auckland etc.: Rider Martin, J. & Sauter, W (1995), Understanding Theatre : Performance Analysis in Theory and Practise, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International Sauter, Willmar. (2004) ‘Introducing the Theatrical Event.’, in Vicki Ann Cremona, Peter Eversmann, Hans van Maanen, Willmar Sauter and John Tulloch (eds.) Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Publishers, pp. 3-14.

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FESTIVALS, THEATRICAL EVENTS AND COMMUNICATIVE INTERACTIONS HENRI SCHOENMAKERS

In this part of the festivalised section we will deal with some theoretical considerations regarding the impact of festivals. We will compare theatrical events within and outside of a festival structure in order to analyse some basic differences in communicative interactions and the consequences of those interactions for the experiences of the participants. Speaking of festivals, it would of course be very useful to know what a festival is. However, here we already meet problems. In the Oxford English Dictionary we find the following entry for the concept of ‘festival’: (a) a time of festive celebration, a festal day. Also occasionally, a festive celebration, merry making; (b) a musical performance, or series of performances, at recurring periods, mostly of three years e.g. the Handel festival, the Birmingham and Norwich Festivals.

Interestingly here, at the outset is the very wide meaning in the first part and the very narrow meaning in the second part. It is this latter more narrow meaning, which is associated with some specific historical and geographical festivals, that we find in other well-known reference works as well. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica (2002 ed.) a reader can find no fewer than 1890 entries in which the concept of festival is used, ranging from the artistic festivals to all kind of religious activities. The description in the French Dictionary, Petit Robert (Edition 2000: 1021) presents as the first meaning also a relation with music: ‘Grande manifestation musicale’. It illustrates this explanation with reference to the Salzburger Festspiele and the Bayreuther Festspiele. Petit Robert presents also a second and wider meaning: ‘Série de représentations où l’on produit des oeuvres d’art ou d’un artiste.’ Here we find again very general illustrations such as dance festival and film festival. More analytical approaches regarding the concept of festivals are lacking. It suggests that the word ‘festival’ is one of those many words about which we know what is being signified when we are in the culture itself. That is why we do not

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realize, and are not worried about, the changing meanings or the different extensions of such a concept. In this chapter we will not focus on the question of what a festival ‘really’ is, but on the analysis of theatre festivals from a communicative point of view. As heuristic method to understand the impact of festivals, we compare the impact and effect of theatrical events presented within and outside the framework of a festival. A FESTIVAL AS EVENT OF EVENTS Like any work of art, a theatre performance is an artistic and coherent whole for which an artist or a group of artists claim and feel responsibility – even when collage or montage principles are used. The theatre makers, be it the director, the author, or the actors, are felt as responsible, or are considered to be responsible for this coherent whole. This coherent whole can be of a thematic, artistic or of a more organisational nature. It is these theatre makers as ‘senders’ in the communication process who will be evaluated by art critics, by the spectators, or by the persons responsible for the financing of the event. A festival is an event consisting of single events, in other words: a meta-event. The single theatrical events are organised and presented within the bigger structure of the festival according to thematic (e.g. Shakespeare festival, intercultural festival), discipline or genre-based (e.g. opera festival, festival of silent film) or other principles (e.g. cultural capital of Europe). Such an integrating principle is of great help to evoke the feeling that we are dealing with a recognisable identity at the level of the festival as ‘meta-event’. In the case of a festival, the total of activities is quite different from a single theatrical event. This not only the case because a festival consists of a number of single coherent separate works, but also because the makers of the single events, the performances, remain responsible for the separate individual works. The festival organisers are responsible for bringing together this collection of separate works. It is interesting that the individuals responsible for the single events do not have to be aware that they are brought together in a new overall structure. This can, for instance, be the case when separate performances are programmed with considerable time intervals, as is the case with the Festival d’Automne in Paris, for example, or in some versions of the Dutch Holland Festival.

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Also in those cases we have to realize that we are familiar with comparable activities. A circus director is, like a festival organiser, responsible for the selection and the dramaturgy in the programming of the order of his circus programme. The clown or the animal trainer remains responsible for the individual quality of their acts. In addition, television programmes have, from a structural point of view, a lot in common with a circus programme and with a festival. The television network is responsible for the selection of the single programmes, as well as for the structure or dramaturgy of the order of the programmes. It is this dramaturgy behind the presentation of the single events which binds, so the network hopes, the intended audience to the programmes of this network the whole night. RECIPIENTS AS THEATRE GOERS, SPECTATORS AND PARTICIPANTS When we direct our attention to visitors participating in theatrical events and in theatrical festivals, then it is helpful to be more precise about the functions we are able to distinguish on the part of the recipients. In order to do so we apply and extend the concepts of Erving Goffman (1975), who differentiated between the recipient as theatregoer and the recipient as onlooker. The recipient as theatregoer is the one participating at the reality level of the theatrical event, the one buying real tickets with real money, drinking real coffee in the break, and the one who is irritated when a fellow-spectator is eating his or her candy too loudly. The onlooker is the one participating in the fictional world and accepting that the character portrayed on stage is not a flesh and blood human being, is not drinking real whisky, and is not really dying, not even when the actions look convincingly like that. In this discussion both we accept both these functions as necessary. However, instead of the onlooker we will use the more common term spectator to refer to the active participant in the theatrical communication. This spectator deals not only with the fictional world, but also with the way the theatre makers use theatrical means to evoke this fictional world. Besides the concept of theatregoer we also introduce the more general term culture participant. The role of the culture participant may of course change into the role of theatregoer once the culture participant enters the theatre. When analysing festivals however we use the term festival

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participant as a more specific designation for the culture participant function. With the help of those different functions, we can describe differences between the recipients participating in theatrical events within a festival framework and outside such a framework. The festival participant, who is theatregoer and spectator as well, is not only able to judge the performance as a piece of art made by the theatre makers, but he is able too to judge the performance as an act of selection and programming of the festival organisers. He can be happy that those festival organisers have offered him the possibility to see this outstanding example of theatrical art, or that they contrasted in such an enlightening way one piece of art with another piece of art. It is also part of this festival participant function when the recipient is annoyed about his experience, because the festival organisers have showed something whose relevance he cannot see at all. The difference between the performance as a single event and the performance as an event within a festival structure is that this festival participant function can be associated with different cognitive and emotional ways of information processing compared to theatregoers visiting performances outside a festival structure. Before we discuss consequences of the information processing of performances within and outside a festival structure, we first discuss two variables which seem to be of great importance for the differences of information processing and its consequences as well, namely the principle of foregrounding and a difference between types of festivals. THE FESTIVAL’S CONTEXT AND SIGNATURE. VARIABLES INFLUENCING THE INFORMATION PROCESSING, AND THE EMOTIONAL AND EVALUATIVE REACTIONS OF FESTIVAL PARTICIPANTS 1. Context – the principle of foregrounding We have to take into consideration as an essential characteristic of festivals the limitation in time and/or place connected with the festival or the festival period. A festival lasting a lifetime is impossible, if we assume that a characteristic of a festival is the foregrounding of this event against a background of events which are not considered as festival. A festival for a whole year could, from this point of view, only be possible against the background of many other years without a festival, or, as is the case with the ‘cultural capital of Europe’

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phenomenon, against the background of many years without a festival at that same place. In other words, a background is necessary against which other activities or a set of activities is being foregrounded.1 It is because of this foregrounding principle that a festival attracts special attention. In public communication this phenomenon of foregrounding is the reason that a festival can be distinguished from other, more regular activities, which are considered to be ‘normal’. We assume that the degree to which a festival participant or a theatregoer is aware of this foregrounding aspect of a festival has consequences for his perception, interpretation and experience of a single theatrical event within the festival structure. The less he will be aware of this festival aspect, the more dominant the theatregoer and spectator functions will be. The more he is aware of the festival aspect, the more the festival participant function will become dominant and the more this function will influence the interpretation, emotion and evaluation of the experience of the spectator. In other words, we assume that in some cases, particularly with a very loose festival structure, such as the Festival d’Automne in Paris, the theatregoer does not have to be aware at all of the framework of the festival in which a theatrical event is presented. 2. Meta-festivals When we look at the intended participants of festivals, it makes sense to distinguish between the festivals which are organised for the same kind of people who would be the intended spectators for the individual theatrical events, and another type of festival which is organised for a group of participants other than the ‘natural spectators’ for such individual events. At an international children’s theatre festival it is possible that we may not see any children at all, but only grown-ups. For a ‘natural’ audience of children such an international festival could even be very confusing, particularly in cases where foreign languages play an important role within the theatrical means in use. Such a children’s theatre festival is intended for the makers of children’s theatre in the first place. The function is to exchange ideas about the aesthetic and thematic principles in the productions of these specialised kinds of performances. We propose to call this type of festival a meta-festival, since the aim is to exchange information and experiences between the theatre makers of the groups participating in the festival. In other

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words, the aim is to organise a discourse between experts about the theatrical works of art. In such cases the festival organisers in fact establish a framework of reference for the participants by which they look differently at the theatrical activities than the natural audience would do in the ‘natural’ setting of the original culture. In this chapter we will not deal with this type of meta-festival. In the case of the general use of the concept of festival, the participants belong to the intended audiences of the theatre makers of the single events. That is particularly true for those theatre productions which are specifically made for festivals. That is true too for all those festivals where spectators are not aware of the festival context in which a theatrical event is presented. CONSEQUENCES OF A FESTIVAL STRUCTURE: A COMPARISON BETWEEN THEATRICAL EVENTS OUTSIDE AND WITHIN A FESTIVAL STRUCTURES Regarding the question of whether it matters if spectators perceive a performance within or outside a festival structure, we assume that the experience of the same theatrical event within or without a festival structure may have consequences for differences in (a) interpretation, (b) emotional experience, and (c) evaluation. However, the degree of the differences is, so we expect, dependent on the contextual factors (the foregrounding principle) and on the type of festival (meta-festival or not), as discussed in the former paragraph. As stated, we will not discuss meta-festivals. 1. Interpretation As mentioned above, the organisers of a festival may influence the framework of reference of the festival participants. What kinds of variables may have consequences for the interpretation of a single performance presented within a festival structure? We expect influences based on: – the information from the festival organisers. This may give a specific perspective to individual performances, and because of that a specific focus and emphasis on the aspects and characteristics of the performance which play a role in the interpretation (and also in the evaluation); – the dramaturgy in the presentation structure of the different single performances. By means of contrast, similarity or

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complementary relationships not only will certain aspects of the different performances be highlighted or disappear into the background, but also recipients are pushed to make comparisons that they probably would not have made outside the festival structure. Outside such a festival structure the chance that different spectators are able to make exactly the same comparisons is much less frequent. The consequence of these two variables is that we have another way of looking at a performance than in the ‘natural’ one of looking at an individual performance outside a festival structure. A performance becomes a ‘sign’ for something, though what that ‘something’ is or could be is difficult to indicate in general terms. It can be an example of ‘good practice’ in the field of a specific kind of theatre; it can be an example of a new dimension in the use of theatrical means; it can be the emphasis on thematic aspects in two different interpretations of the same play, and so on. As a general hypothesis about the differences in interpretation of a performance outside and within a festival structure we propose: – There is more agreement between the spectators about the interpretation (and also evaluation) of a performance within rather than outside a festival structure, because the presentation of the performance as a sign of ‘something’, and the dramaturgy of the context, are focusing the interpretation and evaluation of different spectators; – A variation on this hypothesis is that the more the spectators have been engaged in the ideas of the organisers of the festival, the more agreement they will show in their interpretations (and evaluations). 2. Emotional experience A performance presented within a festival structure: – may become part of a flow experience of the festival participants; – may lead to, or can be influenced by, excitation transfer; – provides more possibilities to gratify the need for affiliation. 2.1. Emotional experience – flow In psychological theories the concept of flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) indicates that a subject is undergoing the (positive) experience of

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wholeness. This experience takes place when there is an optimal balance between the competence of the people carrying out a task and the difficulty of that task. Csikszentimihalyi (1992: 40) speaks of ‘situations in which attention can be freely invested to achieve a person’s goals, because there is no disorder to straighten out, no threat for the self to defend against.’ It is this state which he called the flow experience. Raymond Williams (1974) and other media scholars within the cultural studies approach, such as John Fiske (1987), use the concept of ‘flow’ to indicate an experience in which the borderlines between activities may become less clear and become part of an integrated experience. They use the concept to describe the emotional experience of spectators who watch different single programmes during a television night, but experience this television night as a whole. (We have already mentioned the similarities between a festival and the structure of a television programme of a network). We assume that the intensity of the flow experience during festivals is dependent on variables on the festival organiser’s side, as well on variables on the participant’s side. On the organiser’s side, the question is to what degree the different singular activities were presented in an integrated whole. On the participant’s side, we assume that the degree of participation in the different activities of a festival can induce the flow experience. Particularly when a participant is running from one single theatrical event to the other and is participating as much as possible in the other events of the festival such as information meetings and social events, there will be a strong possibility to evoke a flow experience. We consider the following hypotheses regarding the flow experience appropriate: – About the festival structure: the more the festival activities are interwoven and connected in time, the more intense the flow experience will be; – About the spectator involvement: the more the spectator or participant is involved in the different festival activities, the more intense the flow experience will be. 2.2. Emotional experience – excitation transfer The American psychologist Dolf Zillmann used the concept of excitation transfer to describe the process in which the arousal level accompanying an emotional experience is transferred to another

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emotional experiences, even when there is no causal or thematic connection between the two emotional experiences (Zillmann 1972, 1974).2 When we apply the general idea of the hypothesis about excitation transfer of Zillmann to emotional experiences during a festival, then we are able to propose the following hypothesis: – The arousal of emotional experiences of theatrical events and other activities within a festival structure is transferred to the emotional experience of the next performance or activity. A variation on this hypothesis, based on the degree of condensation of activities in the festival structure, would be: – The more the different single theatrical and other events of a festival are connected and condensed in time, the more the phenomenon of excitation transfer will take place. 2.3. Emotional experience: affiliation Affiliation is the process whereby we want to have emotional contact with other persons. This is considered as a basic need of human beings, and is the basis for the development of friendships and relationships.3 Theatrical events, more than other arts, are able to fulfil this need for affiliation. This is not only because of the relationships with fictional characters which the theatrical arts and media are able to establish, but in the case of theatrical events, because we meet real people as well. Festivals, particularly when they are organised with all kind of related social activities, such as discussions, introductions, meetings of experts, and with a central meeting place, will even more fulfil the need for affiliation of participants than a single performance would. We propose therefore the following hypothesis: – The more spectators are involved in the different activities of a festival, the more their need for affiliation will be gratified. 3. Evaluation In dealing with festivals, two levels of evaluation can be distinguished: (a) the evaluation related to makers of the single performance, and (b) the evaluation related to the organisers of the festival. Under ‘interpretation’, we have already indicated some consequences in the dimension of evaluation, when a theatrical event is perceived within a festival structure. We formulate them now in more specific hypotheses:

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The more the festival organisers have claimed a more specific aim in public statements, the more these statements will function as norms for the evaluation of the performances; And a variation on this hypothesis: the more the spectators have been engaged in the information of the festival organisers, the more they will show agreement in their evaluation; The more the festival is experienced as a whole, the more this total experience will be evaluated (including the affiliation possibilities of the social contacts).

CONCLUSION By these speculative experiments, in which we have followed a communicative perspective in order to analyse the impact and effect of a performance inside and outside a festival structure, we have found good reasons to expect differences in interpretation, emotional response and evaluation between these two different settings. The degree of the differences, we postulate, is very much dependent on the questions: (a) whether the festival structure is a condensed one; and (b) to what degree a festival participant is involved in the different activities of a festival. The higher the density of the theatrical and other events, the more chance there is of evoking a flow experience and fulfilling the affiliation needs of the participants. Nevertheless, it is the theatregoers themselves, who decide to what degree they choose to be involved in the festival activities. Even with a very condensed festival structure, theatregoers will have the possibility to visit only a single theatrical event and undergo the same experience as they would have had outside such a festival structure. However, the more the theatregoer takes part in the different festival activities and the more the function of festival participant becomes dominant, the more the different hypotheses about the effect of the framework of a festival structure for the experience of a single performance will be appropriate. _________________________ NOTES 1

The term ‘foregrounding’ is here used in a very general sense and not with the more technical meaning as used in formalist literary theory, in which it can indicate an emphasis on the artefact level of communicative signs – see Van Peer 1980 and 1986.

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2

For a critical discussion and a more detailed analysis of conditional variables for the general process of excitation transfer, see Cacioppo 1983. 3 Particularly since Schachter (1959) affiliation has become a basic theme in social psychology.

REFERENCES Cacioppo, J. (1983) Transfer in Excitation in Emotional Behaviour. Basic Social Psychophysiological Behaviour. Guilford Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M.. & Csikszentmihalyi, I.S, (Eds.), (1988) Optimal Experience: Psychological studies of flow in consciousness. New York: Cambridge U.P. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1992) Flow: The Psychology of Happiness. London, Sydney, Auckland etc.: Rider Elam, K. (1980) The Semiotics of Drama and Theatre. London: Methuen. Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture. London - New York: Routledge Goffman, E. (1975) Frame analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Peer, W. (1986) Stylistics and Psychology. Investigations of foregrounding. London, Sydney, Wolfeboro, New Hampshire: Croom Helm Pfister, M. (1988) The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge U.P. Pfister, M. (1994) Das drama. München: Wilhelm Fink. Schachter, S. (1959) The Psychology of Affiliation. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford U.P. Williams, R. (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana. Zillmann, D. (1972) ‘The role of excitation in aggressive behavior.’ Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Congress of Applied Psychology, 1971. Brussels: Vol. I, 925-936. Zillmann, D., & Bryant, J. (1975) ‘Effect of residual excitation on the emotional response to provocation and delayed aggressive behavior.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 782-791.

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FESTIVALS AS EVENTIFYING SYSTEMS TEMPLE HAUPTFLEISCH

The arguments for the festivalisation of culture in the world today (Kaptein 1996) seem to suggest that the arts festival circuit may actually in some cases have come to represent the theatrical ‘season’ in certain countries (e.g. see the chapters on Iran and South Africa). Though appearing to be a splintered and diverse season made up of a series of cultural ‘mini-bytes’, the festivals are where plays, performances and other arts events are effectively launched and displayed for the public today. Slogans like ‘As seen at the Melbourne Festival’, ‘Newly from the Edinburgh Festival’ or ‘The hit show of the Grahamstown Festival’ have become a standard and effective part of marketing. In other words, festivals are not only where the work is; it is where the artistic output of the actor, director, choreographer, etc. is eventified1. It is where the everyday life event2 (performing a play, a concerto, a dance, exhibiting a painting, a sculpture, an installation) is turned into a significant Cultural Event, framed and made meaningful by the presence of an audience and reviewers who will respond to the celebrated event. Festivals thus become a means of retaining the event in the cultural memory of the particular society. THE FESTIVALS AS EVENTIFICATIONS However, there is also another, equally interesting, function which festivals fulfil in the broader society, based on what one might call the latent ‘eventness’ of festival itself as an entity – the festival as a cultural event which in its own way eventifies elements and issues of the particular society in which it is taking place. Considerable attention has lately been paid to festivals and pageants, particularly from this performance theory perspective, by researchers who look at the festivals as performances or as theatrical events in their own right. Such researchers tend to focus on the important and perhaps less conscious ideological imperatives lying behind particular festivals.3 (See, for example, Staub 1992; Kruger 1999; Martin 2000; Merrington 1999). One can also look at a number of the current festivals in this way. So, for example, by viewing them as performances in their own

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right rather than merely as markets for a series of specific cultural events, some festivals may be seen as celebrating particular (historical or life) events or particular ideologies and ideas. They do so by framing the events/ideas in a theatrical way, in exactly the same way a play might do.

A Van der Stel Festival tableau. Local women dancing a folk-dance in traditional Afrikaners/Dutch dress, re-enact the arrival of the Dutch governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel, in Stellenbosch to celebrate his birthday. This tableau is part of a weekend long festival celebrating the founding of the town in 1685, and takes place yearly on the "Braak", the Stellenbosch town common, to the enjoyment of the crowds visiting the stalls and tents surrounding the space. Photo by the author.

A good and relatively straightforward example of this process over the years has been the Van der Stel Festival in the small town of Stellenbosch, near Cape Town in South Africa. This festival utilises a formal public ball and an annual open-air pageant to re-enact the festivities on Simon van der Stel’s birthday, when the 17th-century Dutch governor ostensibly visited the little hamlet named after him, and by re-enacting this visit annually the community celebrates the founding of Stellenbosch. The festival itself has no other specific purpose than that. However, though its outside trappings are those of any other festival (e.g. stalls, performances, eating drinking and promenading), over the years it has become a means of reconciliation, a festival shared by all the community, including the immigrant communities and the worker communities from the farms, etc.

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FESTIVALS AS (POLY-)SYSTEMS There are a number of ‘myths’ that appear to govern so much of our idealism for arts and culture in South Africa? A key one is the myth of one culture for all (not the rather antiquated idea that there is some kind of ‘universal’ norm of what constitutes art and culture across the globe, but the notion that there can be a single cultural system in a country). A derivative of this would be a belief in the possibility of one festival for all. This myth has been very pervasive over the years and occurs in many countries and regions. It is however, either a perceived truth, or an aspired-for ideal. In the first scenario we are looking at close-knit communities which are deemed to be mono-cultural, a society where it appears that everyone shares the same physical, social and economic environment and holds to the same value systems (i.e. the same intellectual, societal, religious, cultural and political beliefs). Seemingly obvious examples of this would be so-called pre-colonial societies (e.g. the Dakota, Sioux or Inuit in North America, the Inca in South America, the Zulu, Masai and San in Africa, the Celts, Huns and Vandals in Europe, and so on). More modern examples would most probably include peoples living in physically defined places like the Aran Islands, Sicily, Thailand, Tibet, Madagascar and Greenland, and specific communities in larger countries, like the Amish, or Hassidic Jews. In the second scenario we refer to those nations or societies which are made up of diverse segments, and which strive for unity. The process usually involves the creation or construction and propagation of a sense of unity, a set of shared intellectual, societal, religious, cultural and political ceremonies and beliefs. The examples here are the more recent cases of colonisation, immigration, liberation and expansion, notably emerging nations such as Great Britain in the mid-19th century, the USA at the turn of the 20th century, Germany in the 1930s, the USSR in the post-WWII period, Israel since independence, post-apartheid South Africa after 1994, Iran in the 1990s, and so on (a number of these are discussed in this book). The fact is, of course, that virtually no society on earth really consists of one uniform and set system of societal processes and beliefs. The best one may find in isolated and homogenous societies is that their social system allows the individuals to share sufficient processes and values to make communication and communal life

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relatively simple and – normally at least – unambiguous. However, for much of the world this is far removed from the reality of everyday life. Depending on one’s definition of it, multiculturalism is – increasingly – a basic condition of nationhood in the vast majority of countries and any attempt to attain nationhood must deal with the complexities posed by a diverse population. So too must any festival seeking to express the ‘soul’ of the particular nation. The fact is, no culture is a single system of processes and events, but really a complexity of sub-systems. More accurately perhaps one refer to it as a poly-system, using a term coined by EvenZohar (1979) to refer to a mix of interlinked but distinctive (sub-) systems. Thus the social and political processes, structures and beliefs of one sub-system (e.g. of the Scots in Great Britain) may differ markedly from those of another sub-system (e.g. the English or Welsh). Should we consider this notion with reference to our focus on festivals, it is clear there is also a sense in which any given festival may in actual fact not clearly and unambiguously constitute a single entity, one systemic whole, but something much more complex. While there may be a conceptual unity to the event as a whole (it has a specific name, takes place in one place, at a specific time, has one programme, and a very general marketing focus on a particular issue, culture, form of expression, etc.), yet within that frame it is more likely to be a poly-system of linked sub-festivals, each with its own aims, objectives, supporters, processes and impact - in other words an uneasy composite of (potentially) competing activities. And those involved in it have distinctive, and at times even widely divergent, motivations for being involved – since they too come from distinctive sub-systems and systems within the larger poly-system of the particular society. This a point well illustrated by many of the contributions in this volume. This poly-systemic nature of the festival experience would appear to be a most crucial factor in the whole festivalisation process and its impact on society – particularly today in our mediated, global society. This not only helps one to understand the complex nature of modern-day festivals, but also to understand some of the difficulties facing any attempt at utilising the festival circuit or the specific festival for a socio-cultural purpose of any kind.

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THE POLITICS OF CULTURE (OR ‘WHO OWNS THE FESTIVAL?’) It is clear from all the evidence that there are formidable constraints on the organisers of any festival, directly linked to the cultural politics and cultural economics of the festival. And naturally this may have a most decisive impact on the ability of the organisers (or anyone else) to use the festival in any concerted and coherent fashion to shape artistic and cultural identity. In addition to the primary levels of complexity outlined in the previous sections, the same multifaceted social, cultural, political and economic poly-system identified above has a variety of dynamic forces impinging on it, driving it, shaping the particular (or individual) events, and ultimately vying for supremacy and ‘ownership’ of the festival as a whole. This may be illustrated with a simple diagram (Figure 1), similar to but perhaps slightly more specific than Willmar Sauter’s generic model in the previous section of this Introduction. The star (’) in the centre represents the festival event, while the ‘forces’ identified around the periphery of the model may be seen as representing specific (at times overlapping and/or interlinked) subsystems or domains that impact on the festival event: Figure 1: The parameters of a (cultural/arts) festival

Organisers Sponsors

Media

Cultural politics Artists

National politics Audiences

’

Facilities Commercial interests Local economy

Geography General public Local politics

Playing culture Playing culture (local) (national) Town and/or Community

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Naturally what we have here are only some of the possible factors and forces which may have a distinct impact on, and influence decisionmaking about, and the practice of, specific festivals – it would be quite possible to expand on the list of items. However, limited as it is, the diagram does seem to suggest that any festival event is necessarily a complex matter, and that controlling the aim and focus of such a festival – seen as a single event or eventifying process – would be immensely difficult. For one, there is bound to be a strong potential for disagreement and disunity between the various forces, particularly if they are unequally balanced in terms of issues such as power, prestige, perceived importance and/or public support. However, difficult as it may appear, it is not an impossibility, for one would naturally also argue (theoretically at least) that there may be an equally strong potential for success should the central focus (’) be managed and maintained in such a way as to mobilise all the constituting elements in one event for the good of the event as a whole. In this respect, I would like to identify three qualities of the model which seem to me to play vital roles in some of the festivalisation processes described in this book. 1. Any festival is subject to all these forces, though they may not carry equal weight in the processes or have an equal impact on the particular festival. It is a fact that no festival can take place without the (voluntary or forced) cooperation between all the above-mentioned forces, and, as a result of this participation, each one of these participants has both rights and privileges in terms of participation in the total event. (You cannot, for example, argue that the town in which a festival takes place has no say in the nature of the festival – nor its citizens, its business people, its moral and political leaders, etc. By the same token the town cannot argue that the national sponsors, where such exist (e.g. an international soft drinks company or a national media company), have no say in what is put on and where and when. A great deal of the inevitable rancour and wrangling surrounding festivals often arise from issues surrounding the perceived rights of the various participants. 2. Arising from the previous point, it follows that the forces/fields listed in the model all (potentially) play a role in the making of the event, but they have a particular relationship to each other in

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the process, and – depending on the nature of the particular festival – the weight they carry will vary from festival to festival. It is in fact the weight that the individual forces carry and the power-relationship between the various forces in the festival which determine the core nature of that particular event. (One could also view it the other way round: the specific nature of the festival determines the weight and relationship between the various participants and forces involved in the festival or event.) A comparative look at any contrasting festivals would illustrate the point. (See for example Hauptfleisch in this volume, pp. 79-96) 3. Given its structure, every festival of necessity has multiple aims and expectations – of which local expectations (e.g. ceremonial celebrations surrounding historical, social, cultural, political and religious events and issues, as well as socio-economic issues such as publicity, tourism, job creation, generation of income and the cultural development of the local populace) would normally have precedence. This of course means that no single festival can be a representation (or clone) of the abstract (metropolitan) cultural industry, for it is strongly rooted in its local identity. (In other words, in South Africa a festival in Cape Town is primarily an expression of values and expectations held by Cape Town residents, and would differ substantially from a similar festival in Grahamstown, Pretoria or Durban – even if the plays put on were the same. The nature of the particular festival as event is unique. And this would be equally true, one suspects, of festivals in Edinburgh, Lyons, London, Sydney, Singapore, New York, Salzburg, or Prague). Given these forces, it clearly becomes a matter of some difficulty for any organiser or organisation to really control a festival, to maintain its focus on the central aim. This is amply demonstrated by the programmes of the various festivals, also those discussed in this book.4 The fact is of course that a festival – in order to truly be a festive event – must ultimately be true to its basic nature. As Willmar Sauter (2004, pp.3-14) points out, the fundamental origins of the festival lie in the existence of a playing culture, and the nature of the playing culture will determine (or at least significantly affect) the nature of the individual festival, the way it originates and is run. To

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participate in a festival means to laugh, sing and party, as one would at a bazaar or fête, for it is a gathering of people with shared interests – and if they share similar values (e.g. regarding arts, culture, language, religion and so on), so much the better. How such an event will be managed and used by people, organisations and structures is something they cannot wholly control, for much of it is not to be managed – it simply happens.5 As life does. The fact that significant art is made and/or offered at most festivals, that people have memorable aesthetic experiences, that the nature and quality of art and cultural products are debated, and so on, are exceptional and highly valued moments, but not the norm, not something anyone can (or ever could) really predict, plan for, or manage. The only thing any manager of a festival (with all his/her consultants, boards, advisors, sponsors, support staff, and so on) can really do is to create the opportunity for people to play by bringing together the players and the audiences in a festive space. _________________________ NOTES 1

The terms eventify, eventified and eventification were first coined in 1999 by Temple Hauptfleisch in a contribution written for the IFTR Working Group on The Theatrical Event, then reworked for the IFTR conference in Lyon in 2000. The final article, entitled ‘Eventification: Utilizing the theatrical system to frame the event’, by Temple Hauptfleisch was published in Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames. (Eds Vicki Ann Cremona, Peter Eversmann, Hans van Maanen, Willmar Sauter and John Tulloch). Rodopi Publishers, Amsterdam, 2004. 2 For my purposes here a life event is any social event which can be seen to have performative qualities (at minimum performers in a performance space before onlookers/an audience.) A church service, a wedding, a baptism ceremony, a public hanging, a football match, a war – they are all framed events in some way. But they are not (yet) theatrical events, though they may be framed and ‘read’ that way. The theories of Erving Goffman, Elizabeth Burns, Richard Schechner and Victor Turner all utilise this notion of framing an event as performative, as does the work being done by the IFTR Working Group on the Theatrical Event. 3 In South Africa, for example, these include the 1938 symbolic ox-wagon trek, the 1952 “founder’s day” celebrations, the Van Riebeeck Festival and the 1994 inauguration of Nelson Mandela which ushered in the “new South Africa”. 4 For example, in South Africa there are 11 official languages, but the key ones at most festivals are either Afrikaans (a locally developed Germanic language – based on Dutch, but influenced by indigenous Khoi-San and Bantu, and colonial European and Asian languages) or English. However, one finds Afrikaans productions at the Grahamstown festival from the early years, despite its ostensible aim of promoting English culture, and vice versa, there are the many English (or multilingual)

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productions at the Afrikaans festivals, despite their clear focus on promoting the Afrikaans culture (= the Afrikaans language). Yet none of the festivals have lost their impact in their chosen fields of cultural promotion – they simply do not control the fields, but appear to me to be controlled by the fields. Which, given the way language and culture is made, may not be a bad thing at all. (More of this in the chapter by Hauptfleisch further on.) 5 This facet has its irritating problems, of course, problems which in a way reinforce the argument: if wine and cheese (or beer and a barbecue) are typical of a region, how can one expect that it would not become part of the festivities of a local festival? (For example, if the festival is patronised by many teenagers, how can one escape the pop concerts and discotheques? If the festival-goers are drawn from people whose normal pleasures consist of watching sport and TV, how can you expect them to possess the theatre etiquette expected of the urban theatre-goer? And so on)

REFERENCES Bentley, E. (1968) The Theatre of Commitment. London: Methuen. Even-Zohar, I. (1979) ‘Polysystem Theory’, Poetics Today 1(1-2). Hauptfleisch, T. (1997) ‘The Company You Keep’, in T. Hauptfleisch, Theatre and Society in South Africa: Reflections in a Fractured Mirror, Pretoria: J.L. van Schaik. Kaptein, P. (1996) ‘De beginperiode van het Holland Festival. Festivals en festivalisering.’, in R.L. Erenstein (ed.), Een theater geschiedenis de Nederlanden. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 672-680. Sauter, W. (2004) ‘Introducing the Theatrical Event.’, in Vicki Ann Cremona, Peter Eversmann, Hans van Maanen, Willmar Sauter and John Tulloch (eds.) Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Publishers, pp. 3-14.

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PART TWO EVENTIFYING THEATRE FESTIVALS

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THE THEATRICALITY OF THE VERONA OPERA FESTIVAL LINDA STREIT

VERONA AS LOCUS The Italian city of Verona is a locus which is synonymous with the heightened emotions of Romeo and Juliet, and many lovers flock to see Juliet’s balcony throughout the year; in the summer the city becomes a modern pilgrimage site for thousands of spectators who attend the annual Opera Festival. Opera-going in Verona is unique, since a distinct connection is forged between the aesthetic experience of opera appreciation, the spectacle of the performance, and the sitespecific situation of the opera being staged within the ancient city walls. The production process unashamedly exploits the inherent theatricality of the location, which is easily accessed through a number of elements that together create a unique phenomenon. It is as if the spectator enters into a contractual process with the stage as soon as s/he arrives at the city itself, since the city alleyways inevitably lead towards the play-space, the magnificent Roman amphitheatre, ‘L’Arena’. The choice of Verona as a site for an opera festival was born out of a need to find a suitable location for Giuseppe Verdi’s centenary. ‘How shall we commemorate him?’ the tenor Giuseppe Zenatello asked the famous conductor, Tullio Serafin, who replied: ‘What we need is a unique, exceptional, incomparable backdrop’ (Vespa 2002: 7). In other words, the performance space had to be as extraordinary as the great composer himself. The Arena was an abandoned building, but it had originally functioned as a powerful and suggestive place of entertainment: gladiator bouts were a frequent spectacle in the arena, as well as jousting, duels, riding competitions, ballets, circus acts and theatrical performances. Verona had previously been chosen as the site for the 1822 Congress of the European Nations, when Rossini composed and directed in the Arena the cantata ‘La Santa Alleanza’ (The Holy Alliance) – the Arena lends itself to such occasions that require a ‘larger than life’ experience – the setting has a natural splendour which supersedes the performance, be it political or cultural. The Opera Festival began on 10th August 1913, with a performance of

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Verdi’s Aida, and the following year two operas were performed; eighty years later, Aida was again performed, with a much-waited new production by Franco Zeffirelli. The focus of this chapter is an examination of the theatricality of the Opera Festival in Verona, by considering its diverse components which in total add up to: ‘Verona = L’Opera. Il Mito’. I have borrowed the second half of the equation from the 2001 Verona Opera Festival season programme, which revels in promoting the city’s mythic status; the annual programme is produced by the organising body of the festival, the Fondazione Arena di Verona. Shakespeare, tragic lovers, theatricality, marketing, passion, fashion, tradition and melodramatic presentation meld to create a uniquely global aesthetic event. Opera lends itself to a multifaceted production process, precisely because its very genre transgressively defies definitional boundaries. Is it theatre? Is it music? Is it melodrama? Is it spectacle? In her book Opera: Desire, Disease, Death Linda Hutcheon suggests that: ‘The distinctive theatricality of opera, we feel, is to be found in its hybrid nature, its integration of all these dimensions—not in any resolved harmony, but in tensions that give life and energy to the form of art we call opera’ (Hutcheon 1996: 9). This hybridism is the quintessence of opera, which performs ‘a kind of aesthetic transvestism, embodying one genre while wearing the aesthetic trappings of another, never admitting which is its “real” self’ (Abel 1996: 183). There has been an ongoing debate concerning the categorical definition of opera, since discussions of the Florentine Camerata in the 1600s. This group cleverly combined two art forms – the pastorale (a form of parody) and the monody (a speech song) – intending to return to the aesthetic ideals of the Greeks. But what they actually succeeded in creating was a new form of entertainment for the European aristocracy – the Opera, with its pastiche of singing, dancing, stagedesign and elaborate costuming. EXPLORATION OF ELEMENTS FROM A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE My concern here is not the definition of opera per se, but rather an exploration of the diverse elements which together constitute the theatricality of the Verona Opera Festival. An operatic or theatrical

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performance necessarily embodies a complex system of signing and signals because of its very polyglot nature, so that a purely semiotic approach would be less than conclusive, for this would entail an analysis of the perceptions of the spectator, and as Merleau-Ponty has commented, it is impossible ‘to decompose a perception, to make it into a collection of sensations, because in it the whole is prior to the parts’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964:15, my italics). Patrice Pavis suggests that the term vectorisation can be applied to theatre analysis from a global perspective, since: Vectorisation occurs when: ‘the notion of individualized signs is replaced with series of signs grouped according to a process of vectorisation …. Certain signs or moments in the performance are linked dynamically together and there is a network of meaning which links these moments and makes their interaction relevant. (Pavis 1997: 132)

The Opera Festival in Verona is very much the sum of all the parts, and I have therefore adopted a phenomenological perspective to embrace the numerous components which are inherent to the aesthetic experience of the festival. The numbers of vectors which accumulate to create the festival experience begin with the city itself, as the Roman Arena transmogrifies itself into a theatrical ‘stage’, creating the ideal facility for spectator response. The magnificent Arena and the spectacular presentations are antithetical to the naturalist stage, which: adumbrates a specific relationship between the performance and the spectator, connecting them to each other with an ambitious new contract of total visibility, total knowledge. The promise of the well-stocked stage of naturalism is a promise of omniscience, indeed of a transfer of omniscience from dramatist to spectator. (Chaudhuri 1995: 29)

However, in Verona the audience is constantly assaulted by intensely theatrical elements such as unpredictable appearances of scenestopping animals, or by pyrotechnics, as if the production is vying with the magnificence of the classic Roman amphitheatre. The observer is crucial, and there is ‘a process that has to do with a gaze that postulates and creates a distinct, virtual space belonging to the other, from which friction can emerge’ (Féral 2002: 97, my italics). The production process at the Verona festival is therefore diametrically opposed to naturalism, or what Bert States memorably describes as ‘the causal masquerading as the casual’ (States 1987: 67),

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and is more a matter of a slick marketing enterprise, which draws upon theatrical techniques to create an audience-pleasing happening. The connection between theatre and opera has been commented on by various commentators, such as Kerman Joseph’s seminal Opera as Drama (1956); Herbert Lindenberger considers the theatricality of opera in Opera: The Extravagant Art (1984), whereas Sam Arbel considers physicality in: ‘Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performances’. The banner for the Arena’s website also unashamedly exploits the theatrical element: ‘The Arena di Verona is waiting for you. If you don’t come, one of the protagonists will be missing’ (http://www.arena.it/). Theatre is a complex polysystem of codes, but opera is necessarily even more so, since it unites music, verbal narrative and theatrical presentation: ‘[...] when any one of these media alone constitutes an art form, (it) creates a sense of excess consumption. […] Opera, as “practiced” in its iconic form, replies to its embarrassment by aggressively amplifying its causes’ (Abel 1996:17). This ‘amplification’ at the opera festival is symbiotic with the locus of Verona, as the city itself provides its audiences with an overload of aesthetic consumption. Roland Barthes has considered how the city figures as an urban semiotic sign: ‘The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it’ (Barthes 1986: 86). The urban venue of Verona is causally connected to the genre of grand opera, as well as the site for Romeo and Juliet, and thus becomes a ‘lieu de mémoire’, that is ‘any significant entity, whether material or nonmaterial in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community’ (Nora & Kritzman 1996: XVII). A theatrical mnemonic process takes place as memory and space become mutually involved, so that, as the 2001 opera programme proudly declaims: ‘Verona. L’Opera. Il Mito’. The mythic status of Verona is thus annually perpetuated at the Opera Festival. A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE What are the various factors which lend Verona this mythic status? I attended five performances at the Opera Festival in 2001 and 2002, (Nabucco, Aida, Il Trovatore in 2001, Carmen, ll Trovatore in 2002)

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as well as post-performance events, and I conducted my own – necessarily subjective – research into this global event. On the first night of the Nabucco production in 2001, I indulged myself by being a passive spectator, but I then attended the subsequent performances with my notebook constantly by my side. Being present at the Verona festival is to undergo an overall sensory experience, which commences with the entrance into the city itself. ‘All roads lead to Rome’ is absolutely true of Verona, where every person in the season is involved in the event – either to spiritually enjoy the overall experience, or to materialistically profit from it. Arriving at Verona is to enter into a perceptual contract between the city, the spectator and the stage: the physical setting of the Arena dominates the city, and the classical walls constantly lure the gaze of the spectator, or rather, the passer-by. The ancient city walls hug the city, adding to the feeling of being embraced by a seductive persona; as I walked around, I was constantly aware of the presence of the Arena, with its titillating promise of a future presentation. I could not avoid the fact that the majestic backdrop of the Arena was ready and waiting to fulfil expectations, for huge set designs were literally waiting in the wings. But the stage wings were not placed within the closed network of the stage building – in Verona, the city streets serve as the extended backstage area, so that the sets are piled up outside the actual performance space. As a spectator, I could voyeuristically gaze at them prior to the next day’s performance, enabling the stage props to stimulate my imagination even before I actually saw them mounted within the arena. On my way to see Nabucco, I was confronted with the huge temples of Memphis for Aida, since these massive man-made constructs physically dominated the cobbled alleyways; what is more, they were situated right next to the church. This ironic juxtaposition creates a possibility of the promise of both spiritual and cultural succour, as the sets and the church jostle with each other for the passer-by’s interest. The narrow cobbled streets transform themselves into living walkways, as if one is walking within a stage building and moving towards the auditorium entrance, and the alleyways exude a constant buzz of humanity, as the whole city prepares itself for the evening performances. The network of theatrical vectors therefore begins a pre-performance, even outside the actual stage and auditorium.

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THEATRICALITY AS AN OVERRIDING PRINCIPLE Theatricality is the overriding principle that dominates the performance process at the Verona festival. ‘Theatricality’ is an allembracing term that appears to serve the critical interests of various academic fields; in a recent book dedicated to the subject, the multifacetedness of theatricality is stressed: So, it is a mode of representation or a style of behavior characterized by histrionic actions, manners, and devices, and hence a practice; yet it is also an interpretative model for describing psychological identity, social ceremonies, communal festivities, and public spectacles, and hence a theatrical concept. (Postlewait & Davis 2003: 1)

Cultural anthropologists incorporate theatrical terms in describing culture: a ‘cultural (mise en) scène’, a ‘social drama’ (Singer, Turner); cultural sociologists discuss ‘social role’ and ‘social actor’ (Goffman, Debord), and naturally theatre theoreticians and practitioners use theatrical terms such as ‘cultural production’ (Schechner, FischerLichte). The multifunctional notion of theatre is the ideal for studying that most ‘theatrical’ of genres, the opera. Fischer-Lichte has commented that, ‘by reflecting theatricality, the spectators reflect on the conditions underlying and guiding the process by which they construct reality’ (Fischer-Lichte 1997: 72). It is the presence of the spectator that is the common denominator in all these approaches, for they share the ‘conviction that the beholder is fundamental to the definition of theatricality, since the theatrical phenomenon is acknowledged and rendered operational by the spectator’s presence alone’ (Féral 2002: 3). In Verona, the presence of the spectator is acknowledged even before the performance, as even before the first note is heard, you have to negotiate your way into the stage space. Guards man the various entrances to the Arena, but they are not there to actually protect you, but rather as another addition to the surfeit of visual trappings in Verona. These spectacularly uniformed guards are supposed to connect the city to its classic past, but instead they are an embodiment of Thorstein Veblen’s 1902 dictum of conspicuous visual consumption. In Roman times the Arena was the stage for gladiatorial contests, and the Romans would enter the Arena in expectation of bloodthirstily satisfying performances. Today, the audiences also enter into the arena with a tangible sense of expectation. The tapered

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alleyways physically dominate the crush of humanity, forcing the hordes to enter into a narrow canal-like entrance. It felt rather similar to the experience of creating a new life – the expectation, the struggle through the narrow canal, and the reward of emerging into a wider space, ready to meet the world. The Verona festival is unique, because of its unrivalled open urban space and its classic heritage, both of which demand one’s attention: as a reviewer in the 2002 programme points out: I confess, we were distracted by the usual musical and “operative” business. It’s always like that in Verona, with folk like us who are so accustomed to going to normal theatres, with all those boxes, ceilings, curtains and chandeliers. (Celli 2002: 43)

Personally, I just wanted to imbibe the natural beauty, and not be tainted by modern commercialism but, prior to the performances, one cannot ignore the aggressive selling of the Fondazione merchandise: the larger-than-life programmes, t-shirts, cassettes, raincoats and binoculars are an assault on the senses. And if this is not sufficient, then there is a website urging: ‘Click here to purchase Arena memorabilia: ‘From the pin to the paper-weight to the perfume, everything about the Arena and its operas’ (http://www.arenashop.it/eng/). And yet, in situ, there is an intangible sense of an ‘occasion’ as you sit in the Arena and observe the pre-performance network of signs, reminding you that Verona is not only the setting for an opera, but it also an annual profitable event. A NETWORK OF SIGNS These signs are to be found not only in the city, but also amongst the audience itself. Price is one factor, for even if the Verona opera festival is accessible to everyone price-wise, it is price that dictates which outfits are de rigueur: those who sit in the cheaper seats (16.50€) have waited in line for hours and wear anything that is comfortable. However, spectators in the expensive poltronissime and poltrone seats wear elegant attire, semiotically signifying costly seats (157 €). This seems to the case in Verona, where the need to ‘see and be seen’ can sometimes take precedence over the actual opera itself – some of the audience whom I talked to afterwards could not remember the name of the opera they had seen!

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The weather is another major controlling factor at the festival, one which decides whether or not performances will take place. In fact, for the past few years the Race Met Radar Systems, a group of English specialists who usually work for McLaren in Formula 1, have placed their equipment on the roof of the Teatro Filarmonico in Verona to pick up information regarding the weather by satellite. During the summer opera season a satellite dish is raised up towards the sky in Verona to forecast the arrival of a storm, when it will arrive and exactly how long it will last. During a performance, if there is any hint of rain, the music immediately ceases; then, the orchestra all rush off the stage (to protect their instruments), whilst the other orchestra members and singers take a more leisurely approach to the suspension of sound. It is akin to watching a ‘play-within-a-play’, which in turn becomes a contest between the organisers, the performers and the consumers. As a reviewer at a rainy Carmen commented: Every few minutes we’d be filled in on how the storm was moving etc. till finally, after more than an hour, it let up enough for us to be permitted to enter the Arena. The performance of Carmen began without any further delay because they wanted to get done with the first act, at least, before it rained again. It seems that Arena policy states that once the first act is completed, they do not have to refund your money if the performance is cancelled. (Rabinovitz 1999 review)

The consumers want to see the performance (but not in the pouring rain), the performers want to protect their instruments and their voices, and the organisers want to make sure that they do not have to give a refund to their spectators from every corner of the globe. The international element of the festival is another vector, which adds to the theatricality of the situation; the marketing material and announcements are quadro-lingual, while the spectators babble excitedly in many national tongues, as they anticipate the performance. One is very much aware of all the different nationalities, but then an extraordinary vectorisation occurs, as the audience light candles, creating ‘a methodological, mnemotechnical and dramaturgical method which links networks of signs’ – in this case, it an announcement that the fun is about to begin (Pavis 1997: 132). It is a truly theatrical sensation to witness the visual phenomenon of twentyfive thousand spectators meld into one halo, a halo created by the melding of individual concentric circles of illumination. Originally, candles were used by cognoscenti to illuminate their hand-held libretto

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pages to ensure that they could follow every word; today, while the historic continuity is maintained through this highly theatrical convention, the original functional role of the illumination has gone, for the reading of the libretto is not a primary issue anymore. It is similar with the magnificently dressed guards – the guards and the candles are a link to the past, but their raison d’etre has changed from a practical use to a merely aesthetic one. Verona is a massive global event, which attracts audiences who are not all opera buffs, but who want to have ‘been to Verona’. The slick 2003 Fondazione programme proudly recalls the entrance of the President of the Italian Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, to L’Arena: The Chorus sang the Italian National Anthem and immediately everyone present in the Arena stood up with their little candles lit to sing along, while the speakers diffused the National Anthem outside the amphitheatre into Piazza Bra. This will most certainly be remembered as one of the most emotional and moving moments of the whole season. (Fondazione 2003: 18)

The well-trained chorus has carefully manipulated the spectators towards a of a public expression of respect, which is then judiciously made available to the rest of the crowd outside, to those who cannot afford to be inside the auditorium. The Fondazione organisers are keen to underscore the nationalism and the outreach aspect, more than the exquisiteness of the libretto, or the quality of the diva’s aria, since it is the theatricality of the moment which is highlighted. Nature is another major component of the theatricality at Verona, since the timing of the performances is specifically scheduled to coincide with Nature’s diurnal clock. Nature is the overriding principle, and all have to concur with her. You enter into the area in natural light – which of course allows you to see and be seen more easily, and as the performance continues, the daylight begins to wane – what could be more theatrical? The natural forces dominate the time of the performance, as the moon hovers above the Arena, outdoing any mechanical stage effect. Phenomenologically, the visually crepuscular result is a major theatrical component of this spectacleloaded event. You have to be physically present to truly appreciate it. This highly theatrical atmosphere is reinforced at the commencement of every performance, when three solemn beats on a gong – a gong welded by, naturally, a pretty chorus girl – signifies the start of the performance. The sounds reverberate across the Arena,

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floating out beyond the audience enclosed within the walls, reaching out to those who wait outside. This semiotically signifies and embraces at the same time – for those inside as well as outside - since this primeval form of signing is exciting as well as mysterious. The beating of the gong is similar to the three knocks that announce the beginning of a play in the French theatre. However, in Verona, the element of theatricality is stressed on the open stage, since the sound goes from within to without, whereas in France the three knocks focus on the stage itself. Here, we look at the stage, but we hear the sounds reverberating far beyond it. The stage set is another vector which contributes to the theatricality, since the stage has to struggle to maintain its status against the magnificence of the natural backdrop. Sam Abel has called opera ‘overload’, and indeed in Verona there is serious devotion to providing a visual spettacolo, to such an extent that sometimes the presence of children, animals, dances, and pyrotechnological effects all combine to swamp the actual vocal element. A reviewer of the 1999 production of Aida praises the director Pizzi, because ‘His version brings out intimate moments obscured by overwrought stagings’ (my italics), but then continues: The team combines old and new stagecraft to achieve special effects. Performers and statuettes seem to instantly appear and vanish on the vast stage, heightening the sense of mystery. Assisting the onstage alchemy are 28 elevators concealed in the production’s obelisks and columns, each with its own set of controls, directed by technicians at consoles wedged into vaults within the Arena’s cave-like honeycomb of corridors. (Saccoccia 1999)

This reviewer has been seduced by the visual spectacle – but this is Verona. The official website for the Zeffirelli production of Carmen lists the number of attractions that set the scene: ‘A vortical crowd of gypsies, bullfighters, soldiers, members of the middle and lower classes, priests, street vendors, dancers, children, donkeys, horses and carts animate the stage which is surrounded by a realistic Andalusian frame of buildings, churches and mountains scattered with little groups of small white houses’ (http://www.arena.it/eng/arenaeng.urd/portal.show?c=71). However, the reality is very confusing and, indeed, at the 2002 production that I attended, it was difficult to know where to look, let alone who to listen to. Contextually then, in situ the stage business dominates to the detriment of the plot itself. I have to admit that,

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visually, it was all quite breathtaking, but vocally the production left a lot to be desired – or should I say, heard. The Roman amphitheatre, so the programme reminds us, is colossal yet it implausibly has ‘such delicate and solemn beauty’, with acoustics that can ‘look after the sounds with tender care’ (Arena Programme 2001: 21). However, it is nature which determines whether the voices are heard, as much as their actual quality – if it is a windy night, then very few voices can dominate the might of nature, and the arias float out with the wind, away from the arena. The performance itself varies from production to production, but you can be sure that the ‘stage business’ will be exaggerated, often to the detriment of the singing itself. Enthusiastic spectator response is part and parcel of the theatricality of Verona, but it is very disconcerting when the cognoscenti make loud hissing sounds at any ignoramus who has dared to clap in the middle of an aria; the result is an awkward juxtaposition of clapping hands, hissing mouths and melodic operatic arias. The clapping at the end of the performance assumes a contestlike status, where each audience section of the Arena vies with the other, trying to win the ‘noisy’ bet. This was particularly evident with the appearance of the newly discovered tenor Salvatore Licitra, as Manrico in the 2001 production of Il Trovatore. Licitra had previously sung at La Scala, where conductor Riccardo Muti ‘forbade his tenor to sing the traditional, interpolated high C of the 3rd act cabaletta, Di quella pira. There were uproars in the audience, who booed the maestro’s decision. 6 months later Licitra got to sing the part again in Verona and interpolated two high C’s, the public burst out in a wild frenzy and he had to encore the aria, interpolating once more the C’s’ (Anthonisen, granditenori.com). The audience, rather than the maestro, calls the tune at Verona opera festival. And yet, even if this sounds snobbish, you cannot help yourself in also being carried along with the crowd, and wildly clapping and cheering when the projector lights are focused on your part of arena. Even the applause is larger than life in Verona. THEATRICALITY ADDS UP TO THE SUM OF MANY PARTS The theatricality of the production is extended beyond the close of the performance, as the audience streams out of the arena and into the open spaces beside the Roman walls. Hundreds of spectators swarm to

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the various restaurants and cafés, and now enthusiastically turn their attention to food – and this is at one in the morning. At a time when most restaurant owners would be asleep, in Verona they wait for customers. The timing, remember, has been dominated by nature’s clock – the performance has to wait for twilight, so the audience has to wait to eat. Very few eat before a production, because there is another essentially theatrical production which takes place after the performance. The major artists, and particularly the conductor, will also attend an outdoor dinner. Their arrival is eagerly anticipated, and the adulation is similar to that accorded a rock-star. As the artists appear, as if on cue the spectator-diners all stand up, cry out in unison ‘Bravo Maestro’ or ‘Bravo Diva’, and wildly applaud them. It is an extraordinary theatrical performance to witness, signifying closure of that evening’s performance. It is endemic of going to the Opera Festival in Verona, where the artists enjoy a quasi-divine status: Verona – L’Opera. Il Mito. The Verona festival is the sum of many parts, which derive from the overall theatricality of the occasion. If we consider the OED’s first citation for ‘theatricality’: ‘By act and word he strives to do it; with sincerity, if possible; failing that, with theatricality, which latter also may have its meaning.’, then it is clear how the numerous vectors invest the festival with its own unique meaning (Carlysle 1855: 328). The magnificence of the setting is fore-grounded, more than the actual musical content, but together they form the structure of communication with the audience. In The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective Fischer-Lichte notes how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘the focus of interest now shifted to the relations between the stage and the spectator: the external communication between stage and audience’ (Fischer-Lichte 1997: 41). She discusses how Meyerhold was against the passivity of the spectator, and that it was necessary to add to the ‘triangle theatre’ of playwright, director, actor, ‘the fourth fundamental element being the spectator’, to create a new ‘stylized’ theatre ‘in which the spectator can creatively complete, in imagination , that which the stage only indicates’ (Meyerhold 1979: vol.1: 135, note 5). In Verona nothing is ‘indicated’, it is all given absolute clarity: Aida has to have its temples and Carmen needs its gypsies to ensure a commercial success. Instead of allowing the magnificence of the Arena to seduce the audience, it seems to me that the Fondazione overdoes the theatricality, which is

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the sacrifice of ‘dramatic illusion vitiated in the attempt to impress the beholder and solicit his applause’ (Fried 1980: 100). Very little is left to the imagination; but whether I am a spectator or a reader, I want to be able to exercise my mind’s eye. In ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’, Wolfgang Iser observes: ‘If the reader were given the whole story and there was nothing left for him to do, then his imagination would never enter the field, the result would be the boredom which inevitably arises when everything is laid out cut and dried before us’ (Iser 1988: 212-3). In Verona one can never be bored because of the inherent theatricality of the locus, but the actual musical content can sometimes be too heavy-handed, I would suggest even too patronising, towards the audience. However, this may be similar to the work of Rene Pixérécourt, whose melodramas could be emotionally understood even by ‘those who cannot read’; in a similar fashion, in Verona the productions often rely on visual spectacle and modern technology to seduce the spectator who may not understand opera. The Verona Opera Festival is a global event composed of many elements, which meld to produce an aesthetic experience, in the sense of the original meaning of the Greek word aesthesis: sensory perception. In a discussion of spectator response to opera, Hutcheon avers that ‘One of the things music shares with the rest of the culture in which it is embedded is that it is given meaning by those who experience it.’, but the Verona Opera Festival is the sum of many parts beyond the mere musical performance in a city opera house (Hutcheon 1996: 10). My approach has been more inclusively phenomenological, rather than divisively semiotic, to incorporate not only opera as a polyglot genre, but also the unavoidable legendary eminence of Verona itself. The theatricality of the Verona Opera Festival is a combination of a number of vectors, which perpetuate the uniqueness of this global aesthetic event: ‘Verona: L’Opera. Il Mito’. _________________________ REFERENCES Abel, S. (1996) Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performances. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Anthonisen, J. http://www.grandi-tenori.com/tenors/new/licitra.php. Accessed 9 May 2005.

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Arena di Verona, Programme 2001, 2002, 2003, Verona: Fondazione Arena di Verona. Barthes, R. (1986) ‘Semiology and the Urban’ in The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, M. Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopulos, eds. New York: Columbia University Press: 86-99. First published in French, in L’architecture d’aujourd’hui (la ville), 153 (December 1970January 1971), 11-13. Carlyle, T. (1855) The French Revolution: A History, 3 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. Celli, T. (2002) ‘I too was up there singing in the Arena’, L’Opera. Il Mito: 80 anni di spettacoli all’Arena di Verona, ‘Introduzione’, Arena di Verona Festival 2002 programme. Verona: Fondazione Arena di Verona. Chaudhuri, U. (1995) Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Debord, G. (1973) Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Black & Red. Féral, J. (2002) ‘Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language’, Sub-Stance 31.2/3: 3-13, 94-108. Fischer-Lichte, E. (1997) The Show and the Gaze of European Theatre: A European Perspective, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Fried, M. (1980) Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday. Hutcheon, L. (1996) Opera: Desire, Disease, Death, Nebraska: University of Nebraska. IFTR, (International Federation of Theatre Research), (1998) 13th World Congress, Canterbury UK: IFTR Programme. Iser, W. (1988) ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge. New York: Longman. Joseph, K. (1989) Opera as Drama. London: Faber and Faber. Lindenberger, H. (1984) Opera: The Extravagant Art. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) The Primacy of Perception and other essays on phenomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history and politics. Evanston: Northern University Press. Meyerhold, V.E. (1979) Schriften, 2 vols. vol. 1: 135, note 5. Translated by Erika Fischer-Lichte. Berlin: Henschel. Nora, P. and Kritzman, L.D. (eds), (1996) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 1: conflicts and divisions, ed. L. Kritzman, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. Pavis, P. (1997) ‘The State of Current Theatre Research’, Applied Semiotics/Sémiotiques Appliqués, 3: 126-40. Toronto: University of Toronto. Postlewait, T. and David, T. (eds), (2003) Theatricality, London: Cambridge University Press. Rabinovitz, A. (1999) Review of Carmen and Tosca, 29.6.1999, Arena di Verona, http://jcarreras.com/contribute/c_rev006.htm. Accessed 8 May 2005. Saccoccia, S. (1999) ‘Opera grande, with an intimate touch’, Christian Science Monitor, July 1999, csmonitor.com/durable/1999/07/23/p20s1.htm. Accessed 8 May 2005.

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Schechner, R. (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Singer, M. (1989) Man’s Glassy Essence: explorations in semiotic anthropology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. States, B. O. (1985) Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, Berkeley and Los Angleles: University of California Press. Vespa, B. (2002) ‘The Immortal Lady’, Verona: Fondazione Arena di Verona.

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THE OUT-OF-THE-BOX FESTIVAL OF EARLY CHILDHOOD: FASHIONING THE BOUTIQUE FESTIVAL FOR CHILDREN GEORGIA SEFFRIN

INTRODUCTION There can be little doubt that the festival has become a significant cultural entity in the contemporary Western world, and it can be seen that this trend has consolidated generally into one of two guises: the major arts event, bringing the world’s best and most avant-garde to a host city, and the small community arts model, which draws significantly on that most traditional function of the festival: the coalescence of a community. This analysis, however, will address a third model, that of the boutique festival, which conjoins elements of both the major arts event with those of the community model. Utilising the Australian Out-of-the-Box Festival of Early Childhood as an example, it will be demonstrated how elements from both festival traditions are bound together to create an alternative model that raises significant issues about the function of this cultural phenomenon, particularly in its positioning of the audience. THE BOUTIQUE FESTIVAL The term ‘boutique’ is employed here in the sense of its development as a retail phenomenon of the late 1950s, early 1960s: ‘boutique departments in the big stores [were] designed to fill the gap between custom-made couture clothes and those made by wholesale houses’ (Fogg 2003:7). Just as this innovative shopping experience was located between the high and popular end of consumerist taste, so too is the boutique festival located between the ‘department store’ model of arts festival production, whereby audiences purchase tickets for a range of often avant-garde and dazzling international aesthetic experiences, and the community arts event, in which the focus is on the experience of the participant, and not on polished, dazzling work. Whilst the idea of a boutique has perhaps come to denote exclusivity or prestige, within this discussion it is employed in terms

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of its derivation as articulated above, in which ‘[…]tiny boutiques sprang up offering the latest fashions, more often than not run by young people who understood the Sixties scene, its fashions, and the demands of its clientele’ (Worsley 2000:532). Similarly in this context, the boutique festival can be categorised as one which caters for a particular audience and is produced by those with particular knowledges and insight regarding this audience, as opposed to major arts festivals in which programming usually aims to cast as wide an aesthetic net as possible. Just as ‘sharing attitudes, values and practices with customers was an instrumental factor in the successful development of boutique culture’ (Fogg 2003:17), the producers of the boutique festival to be examined here aim to connect deeply with their target audience in a way that encourages the festival construct to function as a dialogue between producer, artist and audience, rather than as a department store model of cultural wares, which the audience consumes relatively passively. The Out of the Box Festival, as a boutique festival event, does not aim to create a lofty brand of aesthetic exclusivity aimed at a particularly high end of the market, yet nor does it operate on the kind of broad mass appeal that other kinds of entertainment for children aim to corner. This boutique festival not only ‘fills a gap’ in between the two ends of children’s cultural activity, but aims to position audiences themselves as significant agents of cultural production. THE-OUT-OF-THE-BOX FESTIVAL The Out-of-the-Box Festival of Early Childhood is a biennial event held in Brisbane, Australia, a city of approximately 1.5 million residents; it is organised by the state’s premier cultural producer, the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC). Since its inception in 1992, this festival has become an internationally recognised event both in terms of its scale, attracting audiences of around 65,000 to each festival, and most significantly, the manner in which it privileges children’s cultural experience. It caters for children between the ages of 3-8 years, and the event occurs over a period of six days in June. Programming incorporates a blend of curated product, productions toured from national children’s theatre companies of high renown, a series of workshops for children, as well as art installations, and selfdirected activities within the festival’s physical domain.

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The event highlights key issues pertaining to the reading of festival as a theatrical event, chiefly in the areas of audience as author, and the re-positioning of forms that are usually considered the domain of adult appreciation. This discussion will draw on examples from the 2000, 2002 and 2004 festivals. POSITIONING OF THE AUDIENCE As has been noted, the chief points of interest within the discussion centre on the programming of the event, and the manner in which the audience is positioned: here children are framed as culturally intelligent contributors who can discern and participate actively within the framework of a festival model, its programming, and in actual festival events themselves. There are a number of practices that Susan Richer, the current Creative Producer of Out-of-the-Box, has developed to ensure that young people are effectively engaged in dialogue (Richer 2000b: 7-8). In summary, these strategies are: engaging in two-way communication by talking to young people rather than at them, and disseminating information via channels that young people trust; prizing eccentricity and diversity, by exploring less obvious creative solutions, and listening to those who have been denied a voice or presence; developing a learning culture by taking an active interest in youth culture and theory when working with young people; connecting with lifestyles by ‘allowing young people to self-narrate within safe and appropriate contexts [that] provide more information about their interests, values and tastes than any amount of market research’ (Richer 2000b:8); being flexible enough to allow frameworks that are transparent and than can accommodate change; and being ethical. Young people can read insincerity very easily and it has ‘brought many a corporation that relied on the youth dollar to its knees’ (Richer 2000b:8). Such a working methodology ensures that young people, including both children and teenagers, are involved in the process of festival making in a manner that is both respectful and inclusive, and which firmly positions these young audiences as significantly authoring their own festival experiences.

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‘EXCELLENCE’ This positioning of audience as actively engaged in process and many aspects of product can be seen as a hallmark of the community arts festival model, which aims essentially to empower a community, and in which the focus resides clearly on process and not on a final product. Unlike the major arts festival model, ‘excellence’ is not a key concern. Community arts festivals function very deliberately as ‘public expressions of “community”’ (Hawkins 1993: XVII), where the emphasis has often rested on the value of festival as a means of self-expression or cultural access and empowerment for the participants, rather than on aesthetic value (Hawkins 1993:118). It is about the ‘political importance and pleasure of self-representation, the authority of people speaking for themselves’ (Hawkins 1993:130). Of course, for children this process becomes negotiated by the producers of Out-of-the-Box on levels different to those of working with an adult community. But at the core of production and programming for this venture is a commitment to creating the space for children to negotiate their own cultural experiences. However, whilst it may be seen that with the community arts model the emphasis rests substantially on the sense of participation, and not necessarily of the sense of ‘excellence’ of the final product, for the Out-of-the-Box Festival quality is always a major factor in programming, as is the belief in accessing sophisticated and cuttingedge programming for children. It is in this conjoining of the balance of quality of process and involvement, and quality of product that places the festival in a significant position. Whilst the notion of ‘excellence’ is a highly contested one, and viewed by sectors of community arts as essentially exposing ‘self-serving elitism’ (Hawkins 1993:158), the Out-of-the-Box festivals aim to provide a reaction against what current Producer Susan Richer regards as the ‘dumbing down’ of children’s aesthetic experience. It is about encouraging children to engage with sophisticated forms and narratives, because they are positioned by the festival as culturally capacious. It is this sense of the provision of quality aesthetic product that connects this boutique festival to its major arts event incarnation. The aim with this festival is to provide works that are dazzling, employing cutting-edge local and national, and occasionally international, artists and companies to engage with a very specific audience. For example,

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the 2004 festival featured a work from innovative theatre company Drak of the Czech Republic, along with ‘Outlookers’, a cutting-edge piece employing an inflatable set from Australian company Arena, which is recognised as a leading creator of innovative arts works for young people. Other notable productions include two multimedia works, Arena’s ‘Schnorky the Wave Puncher’ and the QPAC-curated ‘Wide Awake’, both featured in the 2000 festival. SUSAN RICHER Over the course of its history the festival has been shaped by a variety of Artistic Directors, and in earlier versions, whilst the sense of inclusion for children was always evident, the event functioned as a relatively traditional model of festival production, with the Artistic Director creating a vision for the event that was played out via the programming. However, since 2000 the nature of the festival has embraced the notion of children as cultural contributors far more rigorously. Since this point the Festival’s Creative Producer has been Susan Richer, a key Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) staff member, whose methodology focuses on regarding children as audiences and artists in their own right, not as potential audiences for future ‘adult’ aesthetics. She suggests, ‘[…] much of the cultural product presented to children is sanitised, “dumbed down”’ and overly didactic. Out-of-the-Box exists to provide children with sophisticated creative experiences that connect with their cultural lives’ (Richer in Out-of-the-Box Programme, 2002). Richer’s background in Drama Education ensures that she draws on a wealth of professional experience through which to shape her festival philosophy. She has worked in a variety of positions as a tutor, a director of a local theatre company’s education programme, as Associate Producer for earlier Out-of-the-Box festivals, as well as publishing widely in the area of youth arts. Her experience ensures that the philosophical underpinning for the festivals of which she is Creative Producer is rigorous and transparent. This has created a process of festival production that builds essentially from the ‘ground up’, meaning that young children are actively engaged from the earliest stages of the event’s conception and programming, in a process of consultation that crystallises what their interests are and what concerns them, and also allows Richer and her team to test

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frameworks that they wish to explore within the construct of the festival. CONSULTATION This process is structured whereby Richer, out of extensive research and personal philosophy, forms a shell of key ideas to be explored via the festival. From this point, workshops and discussions are scaffolded around the exploration of these ideas, which are then taken into schools and pre-schools to gain an insight into the student’s engagement with them. These ideas often work on a number of levels, either to inform the underpinning of the festival as a whole, or to feed into particular self-curated productions. Richer suggests, ‘Without a clear philosophical framework, art for children becomes “sanitised kitsch” or seeks to affirm the power of adults’ (Richer 2004:11). For the 2004 festival, for example, the workshop process fed most significantly into the production of Australian author Shaun Tan’s text, The Red Tree, explored later in this chapter. By reading and discussing this text with children, and by then creatively exploring ideas that children had raised from the text, the process heavily informed the creative development of the stage production based on the text. From this consultation process, which occurred across a diversity of demographics, further consultation was undertaken with teachers and artists regarding their experiences of children’s creative and aesthetic lives. Findings from each group worked together to build a snapshot of children’s contemporary cultural lives, so that programming was largely built from those issues articulated by children themselves, and those who work with them. PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS It is also this practice of evolving a particular theme or impulse, which underpins the festival programming, that locates this festival within the realm of the prestigious arts festival, in which the programming is created as the result of an artistic vision. However, the theme for Outof-the-Box exists subliminally, and is always explored within the context of the desires and lived experiences of its target audience, via the extensive consultative process discussed above. For major arts festival models, the audience functions more passively, drawing from a range of elegant offerings: a new interpretation of an opera, an

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avant-garde theatre piece, a spectacular international multimedia experience, and so on. Programming is essentially the result of an Artistic Director’s singular vision, and rarely are audiences in this kind of event involved at any significant level in the programming process. Richer also actively engages with youth arts philosophical debates nationally and internationally. She keeps abreast of current research and practice in the field, and thus her fieldwork, coupled with an informed philosophical base, provides the grounded framework for each festival. Key theorists who have strongly informed the process of festival making for Richer include Henri Giroux and Angela McRobbie, who espouse the success of young people in their navigation of postmodernism ‘through the invention and development of new cultural forms’ (Richer 2000a:5). More recently, Richer has drawn on the ideas of theorists who are exploring shifting notions of childhood and the societal and cultural repercussions of this repositioning. For example, David Buckingham suggests: […] in recent years, debates about childhood have become invested with a growing sense of anxiety and panic. Traditional certainties about the meaning and status of childhood have been steadily eroded and undermined. We no longer seem to know where childhood can be found. (2000:3)

Within this climate, children are finding new ways of perceiving and interacting with the world in which they find themselves. Richer contends that children are adept at working with new technologies, and even at a young stage can manipulate and interact with technologies that form a key aspect of youth culture. PROGRAMMING As a result many workshops and productions within the festival reflect this – for example, the range of workshops for the 2002 Out-of-theBox Festival included: ‘Breakdancing’ in which children worked with a leading Australian breakdancing company; the workshop ‘Dreamhouse’ facilitated children working with an architect and town planner to design two- and three-dimensional abodes; ‘Mini-mix’ provided children with the technology to explore musical sampling and DJ-ing to create their own music; and in ‘ready to wear’, participants designed and constructed their own wearable art. Through such experiences, children not only interact with cutting-edge technology

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and cultural forms, but also fundamentally ‘author’ their own experience of these forms, through the processes of constructing, designing, composing and choreographing. For the 2004 Festival a comparable range of workshops was evident, including ‘yum’, in which children learnt about the nutritional value in food and created edible food art, ‘mambo’, a Latin dance workshop, ‘bling’, where participants made their own body art and jewellery, and ‘tv’, which provided a detailed insight into the manufacturing of this dominant cultural commodity. These workshops were complemented by lunchtime concerts featuring a range of local cutting-edge artists. By so doing, Richer provides a platform for young and emerging local artists, often recontextualising their work for audiences who are not usually exposed to them. One such example is local cabaret performer Annie Lee, whose performances are very much in the classic German style, but for Out-of-the-Box in 2002 the work was recontextualised for ‘Ruby Grub’s Cabaret’, a nasty delight of bizarre poetry, songs, music and storytelling, drawing strongly on audience participation. Thus, both artist and audience benefit from the work being shifted out of its usual metier. The festival’s philosophy crystallises that children are also adept at addressing the more serious and difficult aspects of a postmodernist world. For example, for the 2000 event Richer wished to explore those areas often considered contemporarily taboo for children, such as loneliness, loss and death. Significantly, it can be seen that in times past children were not sheltered from such issues: The world of bogies, goblins and fairies is relatively unknown to most of us. Even the supposedly well-loved fairy tails such as ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White’ are today commonly known in the forms told by Disney, as sentimentalised kitsch rather than the dark, mysterious and morally ambiguous narratives they often were in earlier oral versions. (Winston 1998:21)

Such exposure was seen to allow children the space to: connect with their lived experiences – their fears and anxieties as well as their daily triumphs…A program that provides only the ‘whimsical’, the ‘magical’ or the ‘didactic’, does not reflect children’s abilities to cope with sophisticated concepts and complex thought. (Richer 2000a:5)

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KEY CURATED WORKS A conduit through which to explore these issues, amongst other more optimistic ones, was one of the key texts that Richer employed as stimulus material during the consultation process: children’s author Michele Lemieux’s ‘Stormy Night’ posed philosophical questions such as ‘Who am I?’, ‘What is infinity?’ Richer employed this text because she believed ‘it validates [children’s] fears and anxieties and respects their experiences’ (Richer 2000a:7) From this text and consultation process, a key curated event for the festival was created, employing both professional puppeteers and children themselves as performers. For the 2004 event there was a shift in focus to an exploration of the idea of hope and a consideration of the interplay between hope and joy, and hope and giving, ideas influenced by the philosopher Alphonso Lingis. Furthermore, the issue of hope in the sense of attempting to feel what lurks in the interstices, an idea espoused by Isabelle Stengers, was also addressed. In her text ‘Hope: new philosophies for change’, Mary Zournazi suggests that ‘hope is about a spirit of dialogue, where generosity and laughter break open a space to keep spontaneity and freedom alive – the joyful engagements possible with others’ (2002:12). As previously mentioned, the key curated piece for the 2004 Festival, The Red Tree, can be seen to connect strongly with this core issue of hope. The text on which the work is based focuses on a small girl’s sense of isolation and loneliness, but does so via a series of rich and powerfully stimulating visual images. This is a work that explored an emotional experience difficult to articulate verbally, but highly accessible on a visceral level via its detailed images. The production captured this sense by rejecting verbal script and instead employing a blend of live action, puppetry, stunning set design and a sophisticated soundtrack. The imagery created out of this exercise was closely aligned to that from the text, and yet reworked for a theatrical production. The piece ends with a jewel-like red tree growing in the girl’s bedroom, symbolising the child’s sense of hope and ultimate triumph over her difficult day. Performed in QPAC’s largest theatre space, the Lyric Theatre, which caters for audiences of up to 2000, this piece was a validation of both the philosophical and production issues driving the festival.

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REDEPLOYMENT OF SPACE Complementing the visual aspect of this production is the highly visible effect of Out-of-the-Box as an entirety and how the space in which the Festival occurs is recontextualised. The Queensland Performing Arts Centre building itself is like many of its ilk: an early 1980s concrete and glass monolith that is meant to be imposing and formal, mostly used for renowned productions of opera, ballet and symphony concerts. For the Out-of-the-Box Festival, however, it is transformed through design, artwork and the redeployment of the forecourt area and the lawns that surround the building into performance and workshop spaces for children. Richer suggests: Out of the Box increases the visibility of children in the inner city and will continue to do so through the use of accessible and innovative public art and the use of public space. Encouraging children’s participation in public life is an important function of the festival […]. (Richer 2004:11)

Often these workshops involve what can be seen as an inversion of mainstream cultural forms. Once such example is that in the 2002 event there was a lawn bowls arena set up specifically for children. This game was, until very recently, a highly popular recreational activity for retirees in Brisbane, derided by the middle-aged and the young. By this re-contexualisation, as an experience for children, the game takes on new meaning, as does the physical QPAC site. For the 2004 Festival the reinterpretation of the space included a number of large outdoor installations, one focusing on trucks, and featured hand-made toy trucks along with an actual decorated rig, and the other a highly tactile horticultural piece that explored connections with our natural environment. During the 2000 festival one of the in-schools projects was a Mass Self-Portrait Exhibition, in which several artists worked in a variety of schools using a variety of media, from which children created self-portraits. For the Festival, hundreds of portraits were hung throughout the QPAC site. The event crystallised the philosophy of children authoring themselves, representing themselves, ‘taking over’ the QPAC site itself. And for an audience member, this was a powerful visual statement honouring the diversity of children’s selfexpression.

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CONCLUSION The primary issues of audience as author and re-contextualisation of both space and performance style have strong ramifications for the festival genre. Whilst the festival is a highly constructed cultural site, it affords audiences a reading of cultural and aesthetic experiences that is different from a ‘freestanding’ production, especially when the audience is positioned, as it is in Out-of-the-Box, as author, involved from festival conception, through production, to evaluation. The philosophy driving each festival headed by Richer is a commitment to the desire for children to navigate their own cultural experiences, and to participate in the production of those experiences. Out-of-the-Box has carved a powerful reputation for itself, and holds a unique presence on its city’s cultural calendar, largely because this kind of festival model is one that aims to create an inclusive experience for both audience, artist and arts worker, so that the process of festival making becomes an exercise in dialogue. The aim is that each festival experience grows out of and from its precedent, via dialogue and feedback with stakeholders from QPAC, artists, teachers, parents and, most fundamentally, children themselves. This ensures that there is a residual sense of long-term, ongoing and meaningful arts making, with the festival working residually, rather than the short, sharp shock model of many arts festivals globally. One criticism often thrown at community arts events lies in their lack of evaluation: ‘In the desire to collapse the social distance between artists and audiences community arts became something that everybody did and nobody watched’ (Hawkins 1993:132). What this boutique festival model would seem to have achieved is a balance between watching and involvement, and between participation and consumption. It is a model that raises important issues about the nature of festival itself, and the manner in which audiences are positioned in their reading and experiencing of the event: Allowing young people to self-narrate within safe and appropriate contexts provides more information about their interests, values and tastes than any amount of market research. (Richer 2000a:8)

Just as the retail boutique provided the environment in which ‘young consumers became the new producers’ (Fogg 2003:13), the boutique festival in the manner analysed here provides an opportunity for audiences to have meaningful interaction with the festival form, a

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practice that has strong resonances for this significant cultural form globally. Out-of-the-Box is a potent example of practice in which the audience is deeply connected to the entire process of festival production, through consultation and interaction with the actual programming. The festival in this context creates a significant public space in which the creativity and cultural lives of children can be articulated and profiled. As John Kotzas, the Artistic Director of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, suggested: Our job as curators and producers is to create the aesthetic framework within which the artists and participants create the work. (Interview, 1999)

The boutique festival provides a potent space within which such dialogue can occur. _________________________ REFERENCES Buckingham, D. (2000) After the Death of Childhood – Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Fogg, M. (2003) Boutique: A 60s cultural phenomenon, London: Mitchell Beazley. Hawkins, G. (1993) From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Kotzas, J. (1999) Interview with the researcher, 27th April. Out of the Box, Festival, 2002 Programme. Out of the Box, Festival, 2004 Programme. Richer, S. (2000a.) ‘Out of the Box 2000: Summary of Scoping Paper and Programme’, unpublished. Richer, S. (2000b.) ‘Navigation and Self-narrative: key points for working with young people in the arts’, in: YAQ Papers (2 (2): 5-9. Richer, S. (2004) ‘QPAC’S 2004 Out of the Box Festival of Early Childhood’, Discussion Paper, unpublished. Tan, S. (2001) The Red Tree, Victoria, Australia: Lothian. Winston, J. (1998) ‘“Tom Tiver, Tom Tiver Met Yallery Brown”: Drama and the Dark Side of Traditional Tales’, in: NADIE Journal (2(2)): 21-32. Worsley, H. (2000) Decades of Fashion: The Hulton Getty Picture Collection, Cologne: Konemann Verlagsgesellschaft. Zournazi, M. (2002) Hope: new philosophies for change, Annandale, New South Wales: Pluto Press.

IN SEARCH OF THE RAINBOW: THE LITTLE KAROO NATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL AND THE SEARCH FOR CULTURAL IDENTITY IN SOUTH AFRICA TEMPLE HAUPTFLEISCH

INTRODUCTION As South Africa emerged from the trauma of enforced racial and cultural fragmentation under British rule and the apartheid regime in 1990, it set about rebuilding the country and seeking a sense of cultural unity. This desire is wonderfully rendered by Archbishop Desmond Tutu's image of ‘the rainbow children of God’, and the notion of the ‘rainbow nation’, expressing the idea of unity within diversity. This is, however, also difficult to achieve in a country with 11 official languages, representative of a range of political, social, cultural, artistic, religious, economic and other value systems, and a fraught and tumultuous history which left people scarred and deeply suspicious. The very notion of ‘one nation’ and the processes (and feasibility) of ‘nation building’ have indeed engaged the attention of philosophers, linguists, sociologists, theologians, politicians, strategists et al. for the past decade or more. In South Africa the arts have often been mobilised for sociopolitical ends, most notably as tools (or weapons) in the battle against apartheid. During the so-called ‘cultural struggle’ (1971-1986), for instance, the eventifying power of the performing arts was consciously employed to shift perceptions, highlight injustices and confront realities1. After 1994, with the country facing an enormous task of reconstruction, reconciliation and self-realization, the arts (in the very broadest sense) have once more been invoked for a new ‘cultural struggle’, one in which not only the theatrical event, but the theatrical system as a whole is becoming increasingly important as a means of understanding and re-interpreting the past, coming to grips with the present and shaping the future, and thus in shifting perceptions across a wide spectrum and the many chasms that divide people and communities. And in this respect, the festival culture is of particular interest.

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THE FESTIVALISATION OF SOUTH AFRICAN THEATRE2 As one may see from the introduction and other chapters in this book, the festival has always been a distinctive phenomenon in the history of humankind, closely related to the religious, artistic and cultural life of a particular community. This is also true among the numerous peoples and cultures of the Southern African region. A key factor in the rise of festivals in South Africa is the post1970 theatre, when artists utilised various forms of performance, combining ‘African’, ‘European’, ‘American’, ‘Eastern’ and other forms to create the somewhat unique hybrid (or syncretic) theatre and performance forms of the 1980s and 1990s. This period happened to coincide with the gradual rediscovery, reintroduction and/or expansion of the role of the arts festival internationally (Kaptein 1996), and thus a re-evaluation and re-discovery of festivals as important cultural drivers. (Hence, for instance, this book.) These processes have left their mark on the new South Africa as well. Beginning with a few prominent festivals in the 1970-1980 period, and then escalating remarkably in the 1990s under the influence of the reconciliation processes set in motion by Nelson Mandela and so brilliantly displayed in the boldly multicultural, and crossover concert held at his inauguration as first President of the ‘new South Africa’ in 1994 (Hauptfleisch 1997; Kruger 1999). By 1994 festivals had become a prominent feature of theatre in South Africa, the number of festivals growing in bewildering fashion. An estimate points to a festival circuit of more than 140 annual festivals in 2004 – though not all are really ‘arts and culture’ festivals, of course, and there is a great deal of flux in the numbers from year to year.3 While the aims and intentions of festivals differ, many seem to be striving toward some kind of cultural identity and/or cohesion whether we are talking about the continuation or resurrection of old and established ‘traditional’ (also indigenous) practices or newly created (custom-made) enterprises. The practical reasons for this proliferation are manifold and complex, but the collapse of the old, focused and wealthy state-funded theatre subsidy system, the disappearance of the ‘cultural struggle’ support for anti-apartheid theatre, and the rise of a predominantly freelance theatre industry have been important. So too the commercial success of the original Grahamstown Festival (or Standard Bank National Arts Festival as it is officially known), demonstrating the

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strategic potential festivals may have for boosting local industry, tourism, solidarity and prestige. Besides the ‘pure’ art and culture festivals, numerous dedicated niche festivals (or perhaps what Seffrin calls ‘boutique festivals’ in her chapter of this book), including produce festivals and food and wine festivals, have all become celebratory business enterprises. There is a strong air of instability about this system (and a great amount of criticism and pessimism about quality and the long-term forecasts for the theatre industry), yet the festival circuit does ensure that many plays and productions are put on annually, and on occasions some surprisingly competent and even great works do emerge. This seems to suggest that there is life in the theatre industry and a future for artists and technicians. Since the South African state contributes very little direct funding towards the arts nowadays, this is of enormous value.4 In addition festivalisation has had a marked and varied impact on the nature of the arts themselves, affecting both the theatre as a system (e.g. who does it, where it takes place, how it does its business) and the content, nature and form of the work on offer. It seems to me the festivals offer a new sense of community (or communitas as Lev-Aladgem calls it) – particularly in previously divided settings – in a way reviving three venerable South African traditions, all lost to ‘progress’ and socio-political change over the past few decades. They are the old market-day gatherings in the small towns and cities (offering social interaction and bonding within a community), celebrations linked to national and local commemorative days (from celebratory rituals linked to the history of a particular culture or region to imported and created festivals and celebratory occasions), and the touring theatre companies of the period 1880-1960 (bringing art, culture and entertainment to the people). There are obviously a number of negative aspects to the festival circuit as well, such as the diminution of the metropolitan theatre culture (most of the festivals are short-term events in outlying towns, instead of the longer runs of plays in a permanent season in cities), a loss of cultural memory (as a result of the expense and difficulty of doing the classic works, also of the South African canon, the high royalties charged by international playwrights, and the demand for new, relevant work for the new South African audiences), and the lack of job security for theatre practitioners in an event-driven theatre circuit.5 However, by and large, the circuit of festivals has become a

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remarkable phenomenon which has enormous potential for local tourism and the distribution of culture and cultural values. FESTIVALS AS EVENTIFYING SYSTEMS As shown above, South African theatre is today dominated by festivals to such an extent that Stephanie Nieuwoudt (2001), and many others recently, have suggested that the circuit may actually have come to represent the theatrical ‘season’ in South Africa. Though appearing to be a splintered and diverse season made up of a series of cultural ‘mini-bytes’, the festivals are where plays, performances and other arts events are effectively launched and displayed for the public today. Slogans like ‘As seen at the Grahamstown Festival’, ‘Newly from the Oudtshoorn Festival’ or ‘The hit show of the Aardklop Festival’ have become a standard and effective part of marketing. Thus, festivals are not only where the work is, they are where the artistic output of the actor, director, choreographer and others is eventified6 and where the everyday life event7 (performing a play, a concerto, a dance, exhibiting a painting, a sculpture, an installation) is turned into a significant cultural event, framed by the festival and made meaningful by the presence of an audience and reviewers who will respond to the celebrated event in that celebratory context. (All this bearing in mind the essential unpredictability and instability of the theatre as business, of course.) This process – if successful – may give the performance (i.e. theatrical event) or exhibition a life after the festival, by its association with the celebrity attached to that particular festival event (Hauptfleisch 1997). And should luck hold, the festival will become a means of retaining the event in the cultural memory of the particular society. FESTIVALS AS THEATRICAL EVENTS AND THE EVENTIFICATION OF CULTURAL TRADITIONS In the Introduction to this book we suggest that festivals may also fulfil another role in the broader society, namely to eventifiy not only performances, but real-life aspects of a particular society, such as cultural traditions and values. In this respect, considerable attention has lately been paid to South African festivals and pageants which function as performances or as theatrical events in their own right. Such researchers tend to focus on the important and perhaps less

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conscious ideological imperatives lying behind particular events such as the annual ‘Cape Coon Carnival’, the 1938 symbolic ox-wagon trek, the 1952 ‘founder’s day’ celebrations with the Van Riebeeck Festival or the 1994 inauguration of Nelson Mandela and the ushering in of the ‘new South Africa’ (Staub 1992; Kruger 1999; Martin 2000; Merrington 1999). To illustrate this concept I want to consider two examples in South African cultural history, namely the Grahamstown Festival and the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (‘Little Karoo National Arts Festival’ – more commonly known as the Oudtshoorn Festival or simply the KKNK nowadays). Both these festivals have come to play very particular eventifying roles in the theatrical system and the cultural value system of the country – in the same way that the works of some playwrights, novelists, painters and musicians played eventifying roles in society, turning everyday issues and occurrences into socio-political ‘events’. The Grahamstown Festival is the grandparent of modern South African festivals and is annually reviewed and discussed (see, for example, the South African Theatre Journal from 1987 onwards). Founded more than 25 years ago and still going strong, it not only introduced the concept of the multidisciplinary arts festival to South Africa, it also shaped the way in which festivals might be run and has become and remained the benchmark of success to other organisers. In addition, it has also achieved an outstanding international reputation as one of the major festivals in the world. However, its key interest for us here is its origins, deriving from the 1820 Settlers’ Foundation’s original aim, namely to celebrate, (re)establish, empower and maintain the cultural heritage of Englishspeaking South Africans in the face of the triple threat of Americanisation, Afrikanerisation and Africanisation. This cultural imperative was immensely powerful and, though it has been softened, adapted and broadened along the way, it is really what has kept the festival unique and distinctive, and remains fundamental to much of its focus and success. It has also determined the shape and content of, and general response to, the festival over the years. Similar points can be made about virtually all the other major festivals which have followed over the intervening years, each of them having some socio-cultural focus of importance. The best comparable example must be the KKNK at Oudtshoorn and its linked regional

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festivals. It is therefore on this latter festival that I wish to focus as example and case study in the rest of the ensuing discussion. FESTIVALS AND THE EVENTIFICATION OF AFRIKAANS CULTURE The Afrikaans-language festivals arose during what one could term the new ‘language struggle’ of the 1990s, when the Afrikaansspeaking population (like the English in the 1970s) began to fear the extinction of its language and culture under the ANC-led ‘new South Africa’ dispensation and its expressed preference for English as a lingua franca. The festivals include the already mentioned KKNK, as well as the Aardklop Festival (‘Throbbing Earth Festival’) in Potchefstroom, the Afrikaanse Woordfees (‘Afrikaans Word Festival’) in Stellenbosch, the Gariep Fees (‘Gariep Festival’) in Kimberley and the Suid-Ooster Fees (‘South-Easter Festival’) in Bellville. Once more the original impetus was the need to celebrate, (re-)establish, empower and maintain the cultural heritage of Afrikaans-speaking South Africans in the face of the language’s diminished official status, from co-national language with English to one of nine ‘national languages’. There is also the triple threat of potential Americanisation, Anglicisation and Africanisation. Certainly in this respect the series of linked Afrikaans festivals have not only become a major factor in the process of creating, displaying and eventifying Afrikaans plays and the creation of a new expanded canon of Afrikaans writing, but in and of themselves constitute events which seek to celebrate that culture in all its diversity. The KKNK was the first to be established and had as express aim the promotion of the Afrikaans language. From its inception this festival-as-theatrical-event was conceived as a vehicle to express a particular vision of the Afrikaans and ‘Afrikaner’ cultural context to the public at large (directly and indirectly).8 Its example then opened up the way for the Aardklop Festival (which seeks to emulate the work of the KKNK in the north), and the rest of the festivals mentioned above. Powerful driving forces for this network of festivals are strong support from Afrikaans cultural organisations (e.g. the Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Organizations and the Afrikaans Language and Culture Association), cultural and political leaders,

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Afrikaans artists and the Afrikaans media and other businesses (notably Naspers and Media 24). To study this phenomenon more closely I shall quote substantial excerpts from two review articles I wrote and published in 2001 and 2003, which were informal and journalistic responses to the festival event in question, before going on to a brief evaluation of these personal experiences in the final section. (Please note that the articles are used here as examples and are substantially published as they originally appeared, therefore references to time and year – for example ‘now’, ‘here’ – refer to the particular year and city in which I attended the festival – not to today.) THE KLEIN KAROO NASIONALE KUNSTEFEES (KKNK) (2001 & 2003) The 2001 KKNK festival (Hauptfleisch 2001) 9 The main programme alone featured more than 80 productions of plays and cabarets, about 50 being premieres, with as many or more on the fringe. (See also below, the 2003 case study.) In most cases the shared element was an awareness of memory and history – with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the ‘un-manning’ of the white male, the Anglo-Boer war, and the re-defining of the notion of Afrikaner as leitmotifs. Extremely well supported were the culturalpolitical debates surrounding the future of Afrikaans, with Afrikaner pitted against Afrikaner/Afrikaans-speaking South African. Significantly verbal performances – verse, narratives, jokes, chatshows, lieder and folk-songs, debates, plays dripping with dialogue – still dominate Afrikaans theatre, unlike the more physical, non-verbal work dominating the English festivals. It makes sense, of course, if you think of the festival itself as a celebration of Afrikaans the language, i.e. the Afrikaans word. Interestingly, a number of these works did not do well away from the festival venues. These include virtually all the new ‘serious’ plays at this year’s festival. On the other hand, some again have had a remarkable life, notably the cabarets and revues which just seem to be more popular in the cities. This sets up an intriguing question, of course. Is there something like a ‘festival play’ which is only a festival play – acceptable in Grahamstown, Oudtshoorn, Potchefstroom, etc. during the festival only? It would almost seem so. Certainly audiences

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It pays to advertise it seems. As the streets of the Karoo town Oudtshoorn fill with festival-goers every empty space becomes a venue and every shopfront or and wall becomes a billboard - all clamouring for attention. Photograph by the author.

behaved differently at this festival – very easily walking out if they do not like something – to the dismay of performers and ‘regulars’. Clearly they are drawn from a much wider catchment area than a city theatre audience, coming to the Karoo town from across the country, from farms and small towns as well as cities, from all walks of life. The festival appears to be a total experience for many and they have widely ranging but specific expectations of the programme and the setting. Certainly they love the controversy – flocking to get tickets for the Breytenbach show, or shows displaying risqué posters. At the same time they are easily bored, upset or disgusted (or at least make a grand-stand show of pretending to be shocked!) – and reserve the right to say so or to display their disapproval. Surely there is an entertaining sociology of the festival audience yet to be written - and the case of this year’s most controversial play – rebel-poet Breyten Breytenbach’s Die Toneelstuk (The Play), directed by ever-provocative Marthinus Basson. Surely everyone knew what they were in for – a dense, highly symbolic, non-linear, non-narrative and often extremely vulgar text, dealing with issues of trauma, selfcastigation and angst, woven in sublime poetic language and

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presented in a visually arresting form by a superb director and cast. Not your run of the mill ‘popular play’. Yet the houses were packed – and every night people got up and walked out during the course of the show. The director – a lone voice claiming this to be a seminal text in the history of the new Afrikaans theatre (a sentiment not widely shared by critics) – felt affronted, as did the author, and said so, commenting on the bad manners shown by the audience, though clearly basing this on the notion of a European and a metropolitan audience. Then there is the (festival) audience’s perspective: theatre is a speculative process at best, and the festival audiences are generally not ‘sophisticated’ theatre audiences, but people out for fun. They feel that having paid (exorbitantly, they may judge) for the ticket, they have a right to attend the play, but they also have a right to walk out if they wish, particularly if they feel they are being patronized, offended or insulted. Oudtshoorn draws many white Afrikaans-speaking and some English-speaking patrons now, but is not yet much patronised by black speakers of African languages. When one considers the conventions of theatre attendance and response in urban and rural black performance, the mind boggles at what the reactions might have been if the audiences were less homogeneously Afrikaans. Perhaps Die Toneelstuk is not a seminal text, but it is certainly a most thoughtprovoking theatrical event, causing a great deal of spirited debate. In addition there was, as always, the bazaar element, the partying and socialising which seems to dominate at all festivals. To the dismay of some cultural aficionados and theatre lovers, there also seem to be thousands of people who come to the festivals for the party not the culture. They may attend the odd pop concert, go to the everpopular Kaktus op die Vlaktes,10 but for the rest they cruise the streets, stalls, restaurants, wine-tasting booths and pubs. And why not? It’s their money, their choice. Then there are those who apparently come for an annual fix – attending everything in ‘shop-till-you-drop’ mode, taking it in a kind of wholesale fashion, attending as much as possible in the week they are there – possibly to last them the rest of the year. But, again, this is neither unusual for festivals nor limited to Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. All these matters are common to Grahamstown and to Oudtshoorn. What then is distinctive and different about the Afrikaans festival? It is not in the content of the shows or the stalls, it is on the streets. It is in fact in these very pubs,

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food tents, wine stalls, restaurants and camping sites where the key thing happens: everyone talks, jokes and argues in his or her version of Afrikaans. The common denominator in Oudtshoorn is not culture, not even the rather conservative, wordy Afrikaans theatre – it is something more pervasive. It is Die Taal, (The Language), it is the youngest language in the world, it is Afrikaans as she is spoken throughout the country, krom en skeef,11 as she comes, by people from north and south, east and west. The topics of discussion may be politics, culture, plays, concerts, art, controversy, wine, food, the weather, sex, etc., it does not really matter. It is another kind of country this festival, a vibrant space where English and other languages are tolerated in a way (some plays are even in English and actually well supported), but Afrikaans is alive, where it is enthusiastically used, relished, celebrated and enjoyed. For the time being it would seem, the new Southern African context is being seen as a challenge to be confronted and even embraced. The 2003 KKNK Festival (Hauptfleisch 2003) I attended the 2003 Little Karoo National Arts Festival on an impulse, with my friend Jan Vorster, who reserved our accommodation, while I booked our theatre tickets before setting off. A necessary move, for the good shows are usually sold out months in advance. Jan being a man who clearly understands the basics, we stopped en route to stock up on wine, an essential precaution against snake-bite, an overdose of boeremusiek (lit. farmer’s music), boredom, bad theatre, late-night anxiety and the outrageous festival prices of basic foodstuffs. Our accommodation was on the edge of town, an austere but functional room in a wing of the army infirmary (snugly tucked up to some major venues and overlooking the parking area and artery road). The provision of accommodation and food are, of course, two sources of real income and job creation for the inhabitants, and they are not going to let the opportunity slip of fleecing you to the bone remember this only comes along once a year, and then only for a week. So every hostel, garden cottage, spare room, garage, tool- or garden shed and caravan are converted into ‘charming rooms for rent’, with breakfast included (another gamble – this could set you up for the day or barely keep you going for an hour). The fact is there is a serious and effective capitalist substructure in place at the base of the accommodation issue: supply and demand governs all the festival

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activities (at all festivals), and nowhere is it more apparent than in the need to find place for the more than 30 000 people who descend on the town to stay. (The same is true of other towns hosting large festivals, e.g. Grahamstown, Potchefstroom, Kimberley, Bloemfontein and so on). And most people do it well. Next we had a serious planning session for our culture and entertainment for the week, poring over the thick (112 page) programme, which claimed to offer an astounding list of 839 performances, plus 38 art exhibitions. We needed to fit in play attendance with meals, exhibits and lounging around at the free openair productions, pubs, buskers, and the rest while leaving at least some time to drink our wine, socialise, and – if one must – sleep. How do you make it all fit? The organisers do their very best to help you, offering you all kinds of schematisations of their material, scheduling plays on the hour as much as possible. Though, of course, they cannot prevent live shows from running the full length of the hour and sometimes overrunning the hour. Which leads to a lot of late-coming and early departures. We were surrounded by people for whom this is their once-ayear cultural high, who somehow seem able to squeeze in five or more performances a day. You recognize them immediately, sitting on the edges of their seats at shows, a programme clutched in the hand, their watches frequently consulted, sprinting to the door as the lights go down, heading for the next performance, then standing there already planning their next show and their route there. There is a slightly manic light in their eyes as they scuttle down the road. This hysteria is a rather prominent feature of festivals (along with an apparent belief that you disturb no-one if you come in late, talk and loudly eat chips, send SMS messages, read your programme, and so on during the show), which has been exacerbated (as far as the ‘formal’ and frequent theatre-goer is concerned) in the past few years by TV culture and the frightening informality and audience response tolerated by the non-mainstream theatre practice that developed in the old apartheid ‘townships’ and rural areas. In fact: we have some way to go before the conflicting demands of a participatory African oral culture, the TV and technology generation and the reactionary formal theatre practice inherited from the imported and dominating colonial culture (i.e. sit, shut-up, remain seated till the end of the play), will blend into something approximating a general South African theatre-

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going etiquette. For the moment, it is all pretty much up to circumstances, and the source of much rancour and confusion. (See the 2001 review above.) The key must be the premise on which the contemporary South African festivals are based: art for the people, festivals for everybody – whatever their age, race, language, value systems, religion, sexual orientation, social and educational status, theatrical and cultural traditions, and so on. The nature, demands and impact of the festival audience – their status as client and role-player – is clearly one of the key areas to be looked at in any proper study of the festival phenomenon. We found the streets of the large Karoo town ringing with competing music and laughter, and every public space awash with stalls, advertisements, watering holes, eating places and the like. The whole town, blanketed by a cloud of wood smoke, smelled tantalisingly of braaivleis (South African for barbecue) and a variety of aromatic curry dishes. Following the crowd, we found and grabbed a seat with a view at an open-air beer garden on the strategic corner of Baron van Reede and Voortrekker Streets. Here people and cars milled about us, while posters, caravans, tents and stalls seemed crammed in everywhere. From the discussions around us we deduced that the town was bursting at its seams. It began to dawn on me that festivals might actually affect far more than just the artists, the economy and people's cultural perceptions. This thought was going to grow over the days. Since it was a theatre festival after all and I had to do some work, we also saw and discussed a number of shows. For this we went to some strange and far-flung venues not necessarily well-equipped for such activities, but – what the hell! – that is what festival going is about, not so? Actually it seems not, if you listen to the artists and some of the public. They have been spoilt it would appear, for they want more comfort, more facilities, better sightlines, air-conditioning, and so on. The time of suffering for art is passing, some might argue, and something of the pioneer spirit of the original festival has been lost. Yet there is also a point to some of the complaints. Greed seems to be a factor, organisers trying to put too many productions into the venues, allowing too little getting-in time and providing insufficient and under-trained support staff. A dangerous and debilitating trend.

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There were many impressive and thought-provoking plays on offer among the ‘big’ shows (i.e. the serious fare that is supposed to make going to festivals worthwhile), while the fringe and the musical venues offered excellent entertainment, even though many of the shows were clearly stock productions or repeats. In the end I felt that – theatrically speaking at least – none of the plays or musical presentations on offer this particular year had really managed to set the world alight, though this is not necessarily a bad thing of course, for art need not be controversial to be good. Yet the festival somehow appeared a rather bland affair, with none of the sturm und drang, excitement, public debate and disgust or outrage associated with 2001 and 2002. Most of the real energy was being expended at the free public stages, especially the packed Radio Sonder Grense (Radio Without Limits) stage and in the ubiquitous pubs and beer-gardens, offering ‘live-music’. And – as I came to realize increasingly as I focused on what was going on about me – a festival is a many-faceted thing, with something for everyone. Each person would have found something at this year's festival, there was enough of everything. So we headed for home. On the way we once more wondered at the claim of an astounding 839 performances on offer. Could this be true? It had felt like that of course, but it was not. The actual tally of productions – as opposed to performances – was only 180 (and the notion of ‘performances’ was obviously used rather loosely in this context, referring to everything from formal plays and concerts to street events and busking). An amazing number of events nevertheless, which represented a heavy dose of culture for one week. One of the harshest criticisms being thrown at the festival lately (particularly the ‘high culture’ priests and hard-core high-cultural activists) has been that it is not a cultural festival but an ‘Afrikaner bazaar’ (Stadler, 2003). A hugely debatable point of course, but at one level – for one week this year – it was abundantly clear that Oudtshoorn was almost brazenly and stereotypically declaring itself to be a vast and sprawling fête or bazaar, a place where all speakers of Afrikaans could feel at home, to interact, laugh, argue, philosophise, eat, drink, be merry and engage with each other across their variety of social, cultural, ethnic and other differences. At another level we had also discovered that for others the KKNK represents something more substantial, an event of cultural significance. This was very clear from the discussions and debates

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scheduled as part of the festival, in a number of the performance venues, and in the more thoughtful columns of the national newspapers. Interestingly for me, my voyeuristic touring of the streets revealed – or at least made me sharply aware of – other motives, lying somewhere between the two views outlined above. This is to be seen in the actions and enthusiasm of the everyday citizens of the town, the performers, the sponsors, the stall-keepers and so on. In this vast middle space there lurked a whole range of other, more specific and even mundane, motives, many of them relating simply to the day-today processes of making a living, or even in some cases, mere survival. CONCLUSION: THE KKNK, THE ARTS FESTIVAL CIRCUIT AND THE SEARCH FOR THE RAINBOW CULTURE There is an important anomaly that arises from my second experience of the festival (2003), one that forces me to question the seeming unity of the festival. While I have said above that one could see the festival as a unified entity (Hauptfleisch 2001), even if one simply saw it as an ‘Afrikaner bazaar’, I now tend to think that this view may be false, for the KKNK festival is in actual fact not clearly and unambiguously a single entity, but something much more complex. Though there is the conceptual unity of the event as a whole (it takes place in one place, at a specific time, has one programme, and a very general marketing focus on Afrikaans and Afrikaans speakers), yet even within that frame it is actually something much more fragmented. In my contribution to the Introduction to this book I explain this in terms of having postulated that a festival such as this is often not a single entity but actually consists of a poly-systemic network of linked subfestivals, each with its own aims, objectives, supporters, processes and impact. In other words, a festival is more often than not an uneasy composite of (potentially) competing activities (Even-Zohar 1979). The poly-systemic nature of the festival experience seems to me to be a most crucial factor in the whole festivalisation process and its impact on South African theatre and culture. Viewing processes of cultural production in this way would not only help one to understand the complex nature of modern day festivals, but also to understand some of the difficulties facing any attempt at utilising the festival circuit or the specific festival for a socio-cultural purpose of any kind

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– most specifically in our search for that elusive rainbow nation. For example, a number of the current festivals are well on their way to providing such integrating spaces (and the Grahamstown Festival is an important role model in this regard), while others – such as the KKNK, Aardklop and their partner festivals - are still battling to balance the parochial demands of regional/ethnic/linguistic loyalties with those of national unity and the idea of an African Renaissance. The fact is that in the South African search for the ultimate healing of the wounds and memories of a divisive and malignant past, many artists and audiences seem to be longing to inhabit some kind of larger cultural space which contains true unity in its inevitable variety, a space where the strands of difference may be bound together and shared in a larger, more encompassing and overarching South African cultural system. At the moment that space is increasingly and predictably to be found in public spaces and events – shopping malls, sporting competitions and festivals (cultural and otherwise) – they, more than anything else, it feels to me, constitute the metaphoric rainbow of Bishop Tutu’s call. _________________________ NOTES 1 Other examples are the struggle between the British and the South African republics in the Anglo-Boer (South African) War (1899-1902) and the Afrikaans Language Struggle and the evolution of Afrikaner Nationalism (1880-1948). On theatre as a weapon see, for example, Hauptfleisch (1997) and Kruger (1999). 2 I first came across the useful concept and term festivalisering in Michael Kamp’s 2003 dissertation at the University of Amsterdam, where he quotes Paul Kaptein’s 1996 article on ‘De beginperiode van het Holland Festival. Festivals en festivalisering’. I have translated it a festivalisation. 3 This estimate is based on the most recent statistics available, which are contained in the national Arts and Culture Database compiled by NACSA (August 2004). 4 South Africa actually had a good record of state support for the arts between 1947 and 1988, creating the first National Theatre Organisation in the British Empire in 1947, and transforming that into four well-funded provincial Performing Arts Councils in 1963, each with its own permanent companies and theatres. Unfortunately this system was created by the then Nationalist government to support arts among the white population only, and the new ANC government of 1994 replaced it with a more ‘democratic’ and encompassing National Arts Council as a funding agency, providing only ad hoc grants to all companies. (See, for example, Hauptfleisch 1997 and Kruger 1999.) 5 Think of it in these terms: Each new play usually only has three to five performances at a festival, and most companies play about three to five festivals a

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year. Even if these are supplemented by runs in smaller festivals and the particular company's home base (e.g. Stellenbosch, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Durban, Pretoria or Johannesburg) one is talking of no more than 50 to 70 performances a year. There are outstanding exceptions. of course, of plays which become public favourites and have a long and profitable life – and this is the dream of every company, surely – but the majority of plays live for no more than ten or fifteen performances. 6 Eventification refers to the process by which the theatrical performance – viewed as a normal human activity and socio-cultural process – is turned into a socio-cultural event. For by framing a particular happening or event as something of social, cultural, political and other significance, the event becomes a powerful means for framing and confronting the past, the present and the future. And festivals are one of the most powerful eventifying mechanisms available today. (See further Hauptfleisch 2004.) 7 For my purposes here a life event is any social event which can be seen to have performative qualities (at minimum performers in a performance space before onlookers/an audience). A church service, a wedding, a baptism ceremony, a public hanging, a football match, a war, they are all framed events in some way. But they are not (yet) theatrical events, though they may be framed and ‘read’ that way. The theories of Erving Goffman, Elizabeth Burns, Richard Schechner and Victor Turner all utilise this notion, as does the work being done by the IFTR Working Group on the Theatrical Event. 8 Pinpointing the difference between Afrikaner and a speaker of Afrikaans (or an Afrikaans-speaking South African) has become somewhat problematic, as the political certainties of the past have disappeared in the turbulence of the new emerging society. Originally Afrikaner was narrowly defined, limited to people sharing the political, religious and cultural beliefs of a specific set of white South Africans who speak Afrikaans. It was this definition which lay at the heart of the apartheid policies. Many more people in South Africa, however, speak Afrikaans as a mother tongue or second language, and utilise it for cultural purposes. The new political freedom has freed the language as well, and the Afrikaans festivals are trying to make space for the whole spectrum of Afrikaans cultural expression. 9 The two reviews utilised here are republished with the consent of the editors of the South African Theatre Journal, where they were originally published. They have been shortened, but otherwise have been left substantially as originally written. 10 Kaktus op die Vlaktes is an annual pop show of popular Afrikaans bands, songs and songwriters. Literally translated it means ‘Cactus on the Plains’, but it is rather crude joke, for the root word of ‘Kaktus’ (= kak) means ‘shit’ in Afrikaans. 11 Krom en skeef is an idiomatic expression, which literally means ‘bent and skew’.

REFERENCES Die Burger (2003) The Cape Town-based Afrikaans newspaper which gives the best coverage of the KKNK festival. Issues from Saturday 29 March to Wednesday 2 April. Cremona, V.A., Eversmann, P., van Maanen, H., Sauter, W. & Tulloch, J. (Eds.), (2004) Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Publishers. Even-Zohar, I. (1979) ‘Polysystem Theory’, Poetics Today 1(1-2).

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Hauptfleisch, T. (1997) ‘The Company You Keep’ in: Hauptfleisch, Theatre and Society in South Africa: Reflections in a Fractured Mirror. Pretoria: J.L. van Schaik. Hauptfleisch, T. (2001) ‘The Eventification of Afrikaans Culture – Some thoughts on the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival’ in: South African Journal (SATJ) Vol. 15, pp. 169-177. Hauptfleisch, T. (2003) ‘The Cultural Bazaar: Thoughts on festival culture after a visit to the 2003 Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK) in Oudtshoorn’ in: South African Journal (SATJ) Volume 17, 258-275. Hauptfleisch, T. (2004) ‘Eventification: Utilizing the Theatrical System to Frame the Event’ in: V. A. Cremona, P. Eversmann, H. van Maanen, W. Sauter & J. Tulloch (Eds.) Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Publishers, pp. 278-302. Kamp, M. (2003) Festivalisering: Een culturele stem van het Zuid-Afrika van vandaag. In een politieke, economische, culturele en kunsten context, Unpublished Master’s dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Kaptein, P. (1996) ‘De beginperiode van het Holland Festival. Festivals en festivalisering’ in: R.L. Erenstein (ed.), Een theater geschiedenis de Nederlanden. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 672-680. Kitshoff, H. (2004) ‘Claiming Cultural Festivals: Playing for Power at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK)’ in: South African Theatre Journal (SATJ) Volume 18, pp. 64-80. Kitshoff, H. (2004) Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK) [A review of the 2003 festival.] In South African Theatre Journal (SATJ) Volume 18, pp. 235239. KKNK (2001) Feesgids (Festival Guide), Oudtshoorn: KKNK. KKNK (2003) Feesgids (Festival Guide), Oudtshoorn: KKNK. Krit (2003) The festival newspaper, issues from Saturday 29 March to Wednesday 2 April. Kruger, L. (1999) The Drama of South Africa. Plays, pageants and publics since 1910, London: Routledge. Martin, J., Seffrin, G. & Wissler, R.( 2004) ‘The Festival is a Theatrical Event’ in: V. A. Cremona, P. Eversmann, H. van Maanen, W. Sauter & J. Tulloch (Eds.) Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Publishers, pp. 91-110. Merrington, P. (1999) ‘The “New Pageantry” and Performance Studies’, Paper read at the SASTR Conference, Stellenbosch 11-12 September (Unpublished). NACSA (2004) Arts and Culture Database. Distributed electronically to its members by PANSA. Rautenbach, E. (2001) KKNK Feesgids. (KKNK Festival Guide) 7-14 April. Sauter, W. (2004) ‘Introducing the Theatrical Event’ in: V. A. Cremona, P. Eversmann, H. van Maanen, W. Sauter & J. Tulloch (Eds.) Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Publishers, pp. 3-14. Stadler, H. (2003) ‘Die ABC van die KKNK is dat dit 'n groot F is’ in: Rapport, 6th April, p. 3. Staub, A. (1992) ‘The social uses of festival: Transformation and disfiguration’ South African Theatre Journal (SATJ), Volume 6:1, pp. 4-24.

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Van Graan, M. van & Du Plessis, N. (1998) The South African Handbook on Arts and Culture 1998, Cape Town: Article 27 Arts and Culture Consultants. Van Graan, M. van & Du Plessis, N. (2002) The South African Handbook on Arts and Culture 2002/2003. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers.

PLAYING POLITICS AT THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL JACQUELINE MARTIN & WILLMAR SAUTER The 2002 Festival of Arts in Adelaide, South Australia turned out to be very controversial. For the first time in its history, the Festival Board had engaged a non-Australian artistic director. The choice was Peter Sellars, an international celebrity in the field of the performing arts. This star director did not intend to bring all the latest from the ‘West’ to Australia, as had been the fashion in Adelaide since 1960, when the biennial festivals began. Sellars did not intend to bring the world to Australia, but wanted to show Australia to the world – and most importantly to itself! How did he go about it? He studied the local scene and realised that Adelaide was a landmark of Indigenous culture. The place was full of cultural memories, most of which were quite painful experiences. Sellars decided that one of the themes for his Adelaide Festival would be Reconciliation – one of the hottest political issues in today’s Australia, as witnessed by the opening of the Olympic Games in 2000. In November 2001 – four months before the beginning of the Festival – he was dismissed (or did he resign? It is difficult to know) as artistic director and was replaced by one of Australia’s foremost festival organisers, Sue Nattrass. This chapter examines the relationship between power, finances and politics as it was played out at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts in 2002 and how this was addressed at the succeeding festival – the Adelaide Bank Festival of the Arts in 2004. We will be following the model for analysing a theatrical event (See Cremona et al. 2004) which is outlined in the introduction to this book: Playing Culture; Cultural Contexts; Contextual Theatricality; and Theatrical Playing. PART 1 – THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS 2002 Our Experiences Flying from Brisbane to Adelaide on Monday morning, checking into the hotel and rushing through the city, looking for the entrance of the

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Festival Playhouse – the whole area appeared to be devastated by an earthquake – we just made it to the beginning of the first performance we wanted to see. In this way, this was a perfect opening and the performance corresponded perfectly with the topic which we were investigating at the festival, ‘cultural memory’. There were still some empty seats in the auditorium when The Career Highlights of the Mamu started. The frame of this performance is the wish of the author and main performer, Trevor Jamieson, a good-looking 30-year-old man of aboriginal descent, to explore his own past. Before we get to know this, a spectre surprises a group of sleeping aborigines, who wake up scared, but are tough enough to tease the strange figure, touch it and leap around it, without aggression, whereupon the spectre quietly disappears through the auditorium from whence it came. This figure is called the Mamu and symbolises the spirit of the past. While Jamieson explains the purpose of the performance to the audience, his family – that is his real-life family – father, mother, brothers, cousins, aunts, etc. settle down on stage right. Among them is also a Japanese woman, assisting the members of the family, videotaping during long sequences of the performance, but also playing on an organ at certain moments. On the other side of the stage there are two musicians accompanying the episodes on cello and percussion including a big xylophone. Occasionally these musicians also participate in the dancing on stage. Then a number of free episodes follow, presenting scenes of domestic life – young men throwing spears after a toy train, symbolising the railway track, which was built when the spear throwers’ grandfathers were young. Some dances are interspersed, while we follow films and stills on three screens in the background. The middle screen projects at times the enlarged images, which the video camera catches on stage. The peak of the first part comes as a surprise: Jamieson interviews some survivors from Hiroshima, on location. He speaks to a brother and sister about how they were rescued on the 6th August 1945. This encounter depicts the aftermath of the bombing in all its horrors and is very moving, and also justifies the presence of the Japanese woman on stage. The second act turns the political issue towards Australia. The mission, close to which Jamieson’s family lived in the 1950s, was closed on government demand. The homeless members of the family

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The use of video footage, filmed and projected live during the performance, gave it a sense of a story being told for us now. From The Career Highlights of the Mamu. Photo by kind permission of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts, 2002.

moved back to their tribal home at Maralinga. The trip to Maralinga is presented in a very entertaining way with four tyres and some boxes representing the truck on which all of them travel. One of the young children on stage plays a kangaroo, which is hit by the truck and to be grilled later. This funny episode stands in sharp contrast to what we are told next – the tests of nuclear bombs by the British created two huge craters in the Maralinga land (which we saw from the plane as water-filled, circular ‘lakes’). His parents’ families – Trevor himself was not yet born – flee on foot through the poisoned desert, where his grandmother dies. After a long time ploughing through the nuclear ashes, they are brought to Kalgoorlie, the present home of the relatives on stage today. The mixture of different media, inconclusive episodes, some telling ‘nothing’ at all, in narrative terms, together with occasional dancing, creates a very fragmented impression, but is held together by Jamieson’s quest for his own past. His identity is underlined and enlarged by their enactment of their young forefathers of several generations. Only documentary pictures in the background indicate sporadically the different time layers. Through Jamieson’s personal search, we as audience members can follow the crooked path of memories, which have individual, local, historical and political implications. The presentation of the performance is in itself a personal as well as a public appeal. The last sequence is typical of the structure of the show. After a slow and measured dance of the sons, including Jamieson’s own little son, the old father eventually dances a solo. He appears with bare, painted body and dances with heavy steps. After a little while he seems to be tired and the performance stops

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about 10 minutes earlier than expected. This improvisational attitude, however, lends the performance a great deal of authenticity. Mamu offered some key concepts which, as the festival developed, became obviously applicable even to other performances we were to see. One of these was biography as vehicle for cultural memories, another the fragmented dramaturgy, a third one the political relevance of the personal stories. This was evident in the film, Kabbarli, which attempted to recount the life of a stubborn white woman, Daisy Bates, who lived at the edge of an aboriginal settlement for 20 years. It was a contradictory film, which did not solve the riddles of Daisy’s life, but rather demonstrated the complexities of any attempt at biography. In the symposium Cross Connections, the use of hip-hop music and rapping within the Indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Mexico was explored as a means of bringing tradition, memory and history, and in particular respect, recognition and rights, to the youth of today. The performance Shadows by William Yang speaking to his own slides (members of FIRT had the opportunity of seeing his Blood Links during the conference in Sydney 2001), explored two causes united under the heading of ‘reconciliation’: the adventures of a young Indigenous man, Fulla, who at his own request lives with a white family for ten years, which graphically showed the decaying living conditions of native Australians during the 1990s; and the camps to which Australians of German descent were brought during WW I and II – a dark side of Australian history. In the end Yang tries to bring these different strands together by showing pictures of the reconciliation march over Sydney Harbour Bridge in 2001. Yang’s approach is very touching, but not fully convincing. Maybe this new show has not fully settled yet. An important addition was Colin Offord’s evocative music played on his self-made instruments, which were impressive and a very good support for the show. Before the beginning of the performance, we carried out a simple audience survey. The limited number of spectators allowed us to count practically all of them (102 persons). Both in terms of age and gender this audience seemed very ordinary, including the small number of non-white persons (4). The majority of the visitors came in groups, i.e. more than two persons who came together (58%). Very

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few spectators in the post-performance dialogue admitted to any German heritage (4 or 5 persons only). Since Peter Sellar’s own contribution to the festival – John Adam’s opera El Nino in a concert and film version – did not prove relevant for our interest in cultural memory, we will bring it up in the next part. Instead, we want to conclude this first section with a short account of the performance we saw on Thursday night. This was Skin by the Indigenous choreographer, Stephen Page. We had the opportunity to speak to him that same morning both about his choreographic work and his plans for the 2004 festival, of which he will be artistic director. The first half of the programme explored ‘women’s business’ struggling against an invasion from the modern world. The second part followed the destructive habits of drinking and sniffing, and the effects of the urban environment on aboriginal life leading to suicide. This was an excellent production in terms of staging, lighting and sound – in particular the final song by Archie Roach – an aboriginal icon – which evoked a standing ovation by a very enthusiastic mixedrace audience. The audience was a first-night one and slightly older than the spectators of Shadows, as our audience count showed. The gender ratio was, however, the same. We tried to count Indigenous people and audience members of Asian origin, although we know that the genes are not always apparent. According to our estimation, the percentage of aboriginal people in the auditorium was about 4%, and Asians were almost as many. Only a wider comparison with other theatre audiences could indicate how these figures are to be interpreted. Post-performance audience surveys on whether this performance advanced reconciliation issues produced responses such as: – ‘Yes, indeed, but it doesn’t go far enough. We have come a long way in the past two years since this show was conceived.’ – ‘It was a real privilege to be in the audience. This was a marvellous show and very moving.’ The next morning – now Friday 8th March – we left Adelaide, quite satisfied with our aesthetic experiences and our search for cultural memories. There is, however, a lot more to say about this year’s Adelaide Festival of Arts.

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The Festival Structure The performances described above all dealt with one of the festival’s proclaimed themes: Reconciliation. In addition, the festival’s artistic director, Peter Sellars, had announced two more general issues as focus of the programme: Environmental Sustainability and Diversity of Cultures (Programme Notes 2002). While the symposium entitled Cross Connections mentioned earlier, certainly demonstrated a diversity of cultures, it was difficult to find performances or other activities that could be seen as pertaining to the environmental issue. Certainly issues of ‘ecological’ sustainability were paramount (ADSA Journal 37:9). The printed programme was, however, not structured in such a way that these themes would have been easily visible. On the contrary, the programme seemed to avoid all such categorisations. It simply presented the events in chronological order irrespective of themes, genres, events or processes. This, in a way, mirrored Sellars’s holistic approach to the idea of such a festival. He declared shortly after his appointment as festival director that ‘we are going to turn around from having a festival of imports – 40 years ago, our culture was imported from London – to having a festival of exports’ (Peter Sellars, The Idler, 26 February, 2002). The programme reveals a great diversity of artistic activities. From the opening ceremony, which was carried out by the people of Kaurna, i.e. the local aborigines from Adelaide and its surroundings, one could visit the kinds of performances as we did, outdoor performances in the central Victoria Square, where we saw aboriginal dances and hip-hop rapping from various Indigenous communities, and numerous acts outside of the inner city, which we could not visit. It was also Sellars’s aim not only to present performances which the general public could attend, but also to commission processes and workshops, which normally never reached the outside world. Especially various community centres in the suburbs of Adelaide benefited from these kinds of activities. Two examples might illustrate what Peter Sellars was aiming at. At the Queen Elizabeth Hospital a special programme called Nourish took place. Three artistic ‘cooks in residence’ provided the patients with wonderfully decorated and nourishing dishes. Hopefully these cooks would inspire the kitchen personnel in the future, but obviously such an activity was not meant for the general audience.

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The event featured, however, on the front page of The Advertiser with a colour photo of a patient with his tray of food exclaiming: ‘I don’t know much about art, but I certainly know what I like’ (The Advertiser, 6 March 2002). The other example might seem even more unusual for a festival. In the Australian Cultural Residencies programme, ten artists from India, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, China, Indonesia and South Africa were invited for a threemonth stay with local organisations of film makers, visual artists, musicians and dancers. Through this encounter between the regional and the local, the professional development of all participants should be promoted. These artists had no obligation to show any products of their activities. ‘The programme assists in the advancement of stronger cultural links between Australia and the recipients’ home countries’ (Programme Notes 2002: 9). To bring about such a programme, which one might say was unconventional compared to most festivals, Sellars chose an unconventional structure for the organisation. Under the presiding board, two parallel organisations were developed. On the one hand, there was the traditional festival administration, headed by a CEO (Chief Executive Officer) responsible for various departments, such as publicity, accounting, box office, administration; each department was, in turn, headed by a director, etc. Against this hierarchical structure stood the flat organisation of nine associate directors, who were responsible for the content of the festival. These associate directors were thought to work more or less independently of each other. Concerning the relationship to the artistic director and to the CEO, we discovered different attitudes when we interviewed two of the associate directors, Jonathan Parson and Lynette Wallworth. It goes without saying that these structures were bound to create difficulties and confusion, even more so since the artistic director was contracted to be present in Adelaide only during certain periods of the two years of preparation. This is not the place to discuss the pros and cons of that organisation. When Sue Nattrass, the very experienced manager of the Melbourne Festival, was asked to take over the position of CEO in Adelaide in August 2001, she met a ‘divided organisation and a deficit of 3.4 million dollars in the budget’, as she told us in an interview (6 March 2002). The two halves had little contact with each other and too little contact with the artistic director. Programmes were planned without financial guarantees and very few

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productions were invited which could secure the necessary box office income. Ironically, Peter Sellars’s own production of the opera El Nino turned out to be a box office success, but failed, in our opinion, to relate to the overall themes, which Sellars had set up for the festival. John Adams, known for his opera Nixon in China, had composed this piece for the Millennium celebrations in Paris, where El Nino had its world premiere. Using text fragments of the New Testament and other highly stylised poetry, the story of the birth of Christ is transferred to the Californian Chicano environment, where a young woman gives birth to a child in a parking lot. The ‘actions’ of this production are shown on a huge film screen; whereas a large choir, as well as three soloists and three counter-tenors occupy the stage. In our view, the performance hardly lived up to expectations surrounding this centrepiece of the festival. We found the music lacking dynamism (with the exception of the three counter-tenors voicing the archangel Gabriel), and the film looked like a product of the 1970s. After the intermission numerous seats were empty. In the fall of 2001 the time of the festival was approaching very quickly and changes in programming policies seemed unavoidable. Of course, these issues were discussed in public and we will extend our report on that in the next section. What has to be acknowledged as fact is the demand from the board to the artistic director to provide for some productions which would attract large enough crowds to ensure a satisfactory income from the ticket sales. This happened in November 2001, four months before the beginning of the festival. Peter Sellars refused to compromise and withdrew as artistic director. Sue Nattrass was asked to take over his position, which she did; the printed programme lists both as artistic directors. Sue Nattrass managed to bring in popular productions on short notice, such as Barbara Cook and her programme Mostly Sondheim, and Your Dreaming, starring Max Gilles. According to Sue Nattrass, the box office goals would not be reached that year. Nevertheless, The Advertiser reported on Friday 8th March, three days before the end of the festival, that ticket sales had increased and that a number of performances were sold out. Even productions which were not thought of as being popular with the general audiences had been doing well.

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There are a few points that Sue Nattrass made in our interview about the festival which are worthwhile referring to in this connection. Despite the public debate about the programming of the festival, the atmosphere in Adelaide had changed since the opening ceremony. People had seen the festival getting underway, the ceremony was impressive and inclusive, and they obviously wanted to have their ‘good festival time’. She also expressed her deep loyalty to Peter Sellars’s programming ideas, his themes and his aims to reach out to the local communities. In her opinion this would have a lasting effect on Adelaide in the future, despite the last-minute changes. The inclusion of the local communities, especially the Kaurna people of Adelaide, was a very important step and significant for the whole nation. Despite the lower turnout of the box office, she asked: “How do you value the pride of a community?” (op. cit.) For us, this was a profound consideration also in terms of how we value cultural memories. The Adelaide Context When Peter Sellars thinks of festivals as not only containing major spectacles but also other kinds of artistic and community-based processes, this pattern obviously also applies to the community of Adelaide at large. The biennial festival of the arts in Adelaide was founded in 1960 in order to bring major European artists and groups to Australia. This was seen almost as a national task and the reputation of the Adelaide festival was high both in Australia and overseas. Many outstanding and internationally most notable ensembles have guested Adelaide. The artistic directors over the years were respected Australian artists, who had an international overview and a network they could use to bring in the most desired news from the Western world. Peter Sellars was the first non-Australian to be contracted as artistic director for Adelaide. Why was Peter Sellars chosen? There are as many answers as people one asks. Indisputably Peter Sellars had a broad international reputation as a director, especially in music theatre. His televised version of Le Mariage de Figaro has been shown worldwide. His record as festival director is, however, less flattering. In an article in The Idler, Angus Cook summarises Sellars’s career as follows:

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Jacqueline Martin & Willmar Sauter Back in 1986 Peter Sellars was appointed director of the American National Theatre, which is part of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Before that, he was hired to run the Boston Shakespeare Company. Neither organisation survived the experience. (Cook 2002)

According to the same source, it took Peter Sellars two seasons to completely ruin the once-so-successful extension of the Olympic Art Festival in Los Angeles. Under its former director, Robert Fitzpatrick, the festival was accused of being ‘Eurocentric’ (which certainly was true). Sellars promised to change that: ‘no European works at all’. Sellars concentrated on the Pacific Rim (1990) and Africa/Middle East (1993). Angus Cook comments: ‘The policy had one immediate effect. Tickets did not sell’ (Cook, op. cit.) The L.A. Festival was given up after that. Sellars’s aesthetic preferences and financial ineptitude might not have been fully known to the board or maybe his reputation as artist overshadowed his lesser managing skills, but the public and not least the press of Adelaide started to worry about their festival when Sellars presented his plans for potential sponsors. Among those attending a meeting at Stamford Plaza Hotel in April 2001 was Des Ryan, editor of The Adelaide Messenger, a community newspaper of the same group as The Advertiser, both owned by Rupert Murdoch. In an interview with The Idler he remarked: ‘The bullshit detector firmly planted up my nose was screaming.’ He continues: The average Australian does not respond too well to the huggy, touchy-feely, get in touch with your inner self, type of approach, especially not if it comes packaged with an American accent. […] The whole presentation was left hanging in the air, confusing, riddled with ‘new age’ jargon about getting in touch with our spirituality and nothing concrete produced in terms of real, booked, program content. (Ryan, 2002)

There were obvious differences between Sellars’s ideology and that of The Messenger’s editor. Even The Advertiser, the only daily newspaper in Adelaide, had its doubts. More of these doubts were expressed. The Messenger published a special issue on the matter as late as 7th November 2001, and Adelaide is ‘a small town with powerful networks’ (Ryan, 2001). Private meetings were held, board members contacted the Arts Minister of South Australia, who was ultimately guaranteeing the festival.

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Meanwhile, things did not improve through Peter Sellars’s TV advertisements, which he devised for Australia’s largest telecommunications company, Telstra. Sellars used a portrait of Hitler, comparing it to Picasso, saying something like if Hitler had been allowed to become an artist, he would not have become a politician. Telstra did not like the spot and threatened to withdraw its sponsorship of the Festival. While Peter Sellars strove for a community-based, free events festival, celebrating Adelaide as an aboriginal landmark, Adelaide as represented by sponsors, newspaper editors, board members and other influential people wanted their international, spectacle-guaranteed and box-office-oriented festival. Sue Nattrass accomplished some compromises, but backed up Sellars’s basic vision. It is nevertheless of paramount significance that in this festival it was the interplay between power, finances and politics which was its undoing. Let us see if the Artistic Director of the 2004 festival, Indigenous choreographer, Stephen Page, followed Sellars’s example, if he turned back to the grand spectacle type of festival or if he found a third way, since he also stressed that reconciliation was one of the most important issues. PART II – THE ADELAIDE BANK 2004 FESTIVAL OF ARTS We live in a world where we can no longer be blind to the myriad rich cultures of our global kinship. The pursuit for dominance has eroded the cultural values of world families. In an era where we need to rekindle our spiritual consciousness, I believe that the great medicine for humanity is art. Festivals are cultural knowledge grounds awakening our spirit. As an artist, it is my ambition that my cultural heritage will imprint an honest path through my vision. As a point of inspiration for selecting the 2004 program, I have challenged other artists to reflect on their cultural heritage. I believe that an artist’s strong understanding of the past produces art which will evolve and inspire future generations. (Page, 27 May 2003)

Theatrical Playing – Connection to Cultural Heritage The following is a detailed account of certain events which were experienced at first hand at the 2004 Festival in very trying 38-degree temperatures, in order to ascertain the extent of connection to this theme of cultural heritage. With its cast of 22 The Overcoat is the largest non-musical play ever to come out of Canada. What makes it unique is that there is such

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a strong narrative without words. The Overcoat was created as a physical theatre work in 1997 by director and writer, Morris Panych and choreographer Wendy Gorling. Based on the short stories of Nicolai Gogol, it is performed by the Canadian Company, CanStage, a non-profit theatre group, based in Toronto, which has just begun to tour internationally. This performance was a really good example of strong movement-based physical theatre. Not a word was spoken, in what became a one-and-a-half hour performance, yet the audience was so engrossed in the movement language that the smallest gesture or shrug won an immediate response, which was no mean feat in a three-tiered theatre. It was not only individual characters but group improvisations which functioned as time and place changes, e.g. catching buses, the routines of hierarchical ‘office games’ as well as commentators on the developing story. The setting was an enormous two-storied screen comprised of a number of large windows. These could be opened or shut as required and doubled as the boss’s office (upstairs); the boarding house (upstairs) etc. All the draftsmen’s desks (downstairs) were on rollers, as were the single iron beds, tables, chairs, etc., even the staircase to the boss’s office. Place changes were effected effortlessly by simply rolling these artefacts into new positions – and were magnificently choreographed. The technique was a combination of movement and story telling, so obviously from the French tradition, with its easy transformations and precision in story-telling. On closer examination of the programme this is validated. Wendy Gorling, the choreographer, is a graduate of the prestigious École Jacques Lecoq in Paris and has carried on the tradition of mask and movement for over 26 years as well as working on non-verbal theatre. One could have suspected this group of coming from French-speaking Quebec or Montreal rather than Toronto. The big question was why a Canadian physical theatre group was performing a Russian work in a clearly French movement style. Nevertheless, there is evidence of authentic Russian cultural memory here – in the way the story is told about this Russian worker and his precious ‘overcoat’ and how his life changed so drastically for the worst when he gave up his old overcoat for such a dazzling new one. This is Russian cultural heritage as told by Canadian performers.

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RiverlanD – this piece by Windmill Performing Arts was inspired by the paintings of Indigenous artist, Ian Abdullah, tracing his childhood memories. The result is a fictitious story about a suburban Indigenous family, torn between the demands of contemporary life, and the resonances of the past. The computer has replaced their culture, but the past wins over as the two teenagers succumb to the mystery of the river spirit of their drowned grandfather, Pauli. As a result all the characters – grandmother, mother and children – undergo a cathartic change following this sojourn to the riverland. The setting is a stage filled with sand, depicting the banks of the mighty Murray River, which has a history of flood waters rising rapidly, now threatened ecologically. This performance is as much about the importance of the environment in people’s lives as it is about Indigenous values. The river is brilliantly portrayed in an evocative staging, enhanced by the lighting and effects, which effortlessly transports us into the traditional world of the Indigenous people. Every conceivable bit of technology is dragged on stage in the opening moments, as almost a denial of the value of cultural heritage, which we learn as the drama unfolds is what this piece of theatre is all about. The mother has her laptop, sets up a fantastic designer model tent and camping equipment and commences working whilst sipping on a cool glass of Chardonnay. Grandmother wants to watch The Simpsons on her portable television set and the boy and girl are more keen on finding the local shop than taking in their surroundings. In the end cultural heritage triumphs over contemporary values and a deeper understanding is reached between the three generations. This performance certainly did justice to Windmill Performing Arts’ mission ‘[…]to provide children and families with a range of highquality performance experiences that are engaging, enthralling and inspiring [which] will enrich children’s participation in cultural life, education and learning’ (RiverlanD Programme Notes 2004). Holy, Holy, Holy – this exhibition, held at the Flinders University Art Museum, explores the enduring influence of Christianity on Aboriginal people through contemporary visual art by thirteen Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. The curator, Vivonne Thwaties, has set the work of these artists within an historical context, which is reflected by the incorporation of documentary and social

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historical material surrounding the missions of Killalpaninna, Erabella and Hermannsburg. In the words of the curator: The first sustained contact Indigenous people had with white society was often with missionaries, men ‘who came in the name of the Lord’. Often from Europe and from a variety of denominations, crusading missionaries immersed themselves in the languages, customs and beliefs of Aboriginal people. The missionaries ventured into the ‘wilderness’ to convert. In retrospect, we now understand such activities as part of the colonising process. (Thwaites, 15 February , 2004)

This was not always a happy situation. Alan Tucker painted the story of Bessy Flower (1867), an Indigenous woman, who was encouraged to teach the Aborigines about God, but eventually she began to miss her own people and left the mission. To actually see copies of the Bible in Indigenous languages from the 19th Century and Indigenous archbishops surrounded by their new flocks of Christians on the missions added weight to this well-curated exhibition. Again in the programme we read, ‘Flinders University values the special role it plays in the production of cultural knowledge as such activity helps us gain a greater understanding of ourselves and thereby come to terms with events in the past which give meaning to the present’ (op. cit.). Rugs of War – the earliest works in this exhibition date from the 1980s and the most recent were produced since September 11. There are map rugs and cityscapes, rugs dominated by guns, tanks and aircraft, small rugs and large carpets. Many countries have experienced wars over the last twenty-five years but probably none has suffered so much warfare as Afghanistan, or produced so much art depicting it. Afghan rug-makers began incorporating the implements of war into their designs almost immediately the Soviet Union invaded their country in 1979. They continue to do so today in the wake of September 11 and from the start of America’s War on Terrorism. The rugs produced in response to these events constitute the world’s richest tradition of war art of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – a remarkable product of at least hundreds if not thousands of anonymous weavers (Lendon & Bonyhady 2004).

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Contextual Theatricality During the Adelaide Bank Festival 27 February – 14 March, 2004 a number of events were programmed to coincide. The Theatre Programme included a number of world premieres – many of them on Indigenous issues, such as Gulpilil, which traces the life of Indigenous bushman, David Gulpilil from Arnhem Land, who without a word of English rockets to international attention; RiverlanD, which explores the effect of the Murray River floods on a contemporary Indigenous family, and Body Dreaming, which celebrates the Indigenous cultural and spiritual life of the Yirrakaka peoples of north-east Arnhem Land through the ancient art form of body painting, story telling, song and fire; Night Letters, based on the novel by Robert Dessaix; the Australian icon, Circus Oz, renowned for their absurd humour and death-defying antics, who performed The Big, Big Top Show and a late-night show, The Blue Show. Two sponsored events from the UK, 100 and 12 Angry Men, and a highdanger show by the Daredevil Opera Company, Rocket and Roxy’s Stunt Show, completed the theatre offerings. The Dance Programme included two world premiers, including Rush – a collaborative project between Australia and Indonesia, which explores universal themes of drug dependency and withdrawal, the stolen generations, religion and the pain of institutionalism. Other notable events were Kabar, Kabar (Rumours), where Indonesian performer, Mugiyono Kasido, explores the disorder in his own country. The Australian Dance Theatre, working together with New York dance photographer, Lois Greenfield, offered Held, where the ballistic choreography was captured and projected immediately onto a series of large video screens interplayed with a challenging music score. This was contemporary art of the highest degree, which completely captured the attention of an audience of high-school students the night I was there. The Music Programme featured conventional superstars, like Bryn Terfel, as well as new works where Indigenous choirs were involved, such as the premier of Undertow. Popular music was provided by some of Australia’s leading song-driven bands performing at the Universal Playground – a specially designed venue for late-night stompers. On the Visual Art scene, again Indigenous experts were invited to respond to the festival vision of exploring the influence of tradition

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on contemporary arts practice in Artists Week. Special exhibitions such as Biotech Era explored the cultural, social, ethical and ideological issues of genetics and biotechnology. Modelling itself on the Edinburgh Festival, the Adelaide Fringe provided space for experiment and innovation by mixing on-line and street performances. A unique event was Laugh Yourself Blak – black humour provided by six select Indigenous stand-up comics. WOMADelaide (World of Music, Arts and Dance in Adelaide) was a weekend open-air event, which attracted audiences of over 65,000. Writers’ Week aimed to connect writers and readers – international and local – stimulating debate and the exchange of ideas, whilst at the same time introducing new writing and new writers to a large and knowledgeable audience. In addition to AusStage, which is dedicated to theatre research, showcasing theatre memorabilia, as well as attempting to log all live dramatic events in Australia on-line, there were master classes and a Workshop Programme for emerging artists. An event of special intercultural appeal was Universal Families, where extended families from all over Australia were invited to take part in a celebration of family and culture in order to learn traditional practice from cultural elders, artists and some of South Australia’s top young performers. A major drawback in the programming was that many theatre, dance and music events were on offer only for a limited length of time. Popular events such as the Bangarra Triple Bill, which performed only four times, were quickly sold out. This seems to be a standard problem with the programming of events at festivals in the main, but one which needs to be addressed. As will be seen, many of the special ‘deals’ on offer by the South Australian tourist office in conjunction with festival organisers could have well contributed to this. Cultural Context – Organisation It was with a great deal of trepidation that the organisation of the 2004 Festival of Arts was set up, as the 2002 Festival had been such a disaster. In addition to the philanthropic support of some Adelaide families in making generous financial donations, there were a number of donors deserving of the title ‘Angels’ which indicates that their

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contributions were considerable. The Friends of the Adelaide Festival are the community-supporting body of the Adelaide Festival of Arts, who have been the founding financial supporters of the event since 1960. The Friends provide loyal support through their integrated involvement, which includes fundraising and volunteering. The whole event is answerable to the Adelaide Festival Corporation Board under the auspices of a Chair of the Board and a Chair of the Finance Committee. Next in line come the Artistic Director, Stephen Page, and the General Manager, Simon Bogle. The list of Arts Staff employed is long and specialised, featuring a Programme Co-ordinator for each separate event – Music Programme & Master classes/Forum Series; Indigenous Programme; Outside Events and Universal Playground, as well as Co-ordinators for Adelaide Writers’ Week, for Visual Arts and for Special Events. Altogether there were 37 different staff members named, each with a special function. A website was set up very early after the 2002 Festival, which contained valuable pre-festival information such as hints about the programme, statements from the Artistic Director about the focus of the Festival – all intended to whet the appetite, with slogans like ‘a smorgasbord of global artistic expression’, and ‘audiences will converge on Adelaide to draw hope, inspiration and meaning through art’ (Page, 27/05/2003). During the 2004 Festival this website was used to offer tickets to events at reduced rates and complimentary tickets were available for winners of certain quizzes. To attract visitors to Adelaide, ‘holiday package deals’ offered ticket and accommodation per person – twin share at hotels in central Adelaide for three-day packages, which included special tickets to special performances. For example, Package 1 covered the beginning of the Festival, Package 2 the middle and Package 3 the end. There was a special Fringe Package and a WOMADelaide Package. This was operated through the South Australian Visitor and Travel Centre. They also had further tours and tourist attractions for the visitor to Adelaide – such as visiting wineries and other sites of interest. Encouragement to book early was emphasised, with special prizes on offer and competitions to be won. Concession prices were available for full-time students, pensioners and unemployed persons as well as for group bookings. Since its inauguration in 1960 the Adelaide Festival of the Arts has always tried to maintain its reputation as an international festival,

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bringing the best of international arts events to the city of Adelaide. At that time the political arts climate in South Australia was by far the most innovative in the country, and this festival confirmed Adelaide’s place in the global picture. Acclaimed international directors and shows were brought to Adelaide, with the result that all of the Australian arts community would flock there to celebrate. Needless to say, the coffers were overflowing and the tourist industry did very well out of it all. Local artists had a chance to strut their stuff as well, before the eyes of these esteemed visitors. All this changed in 2002 as we have shown in Part I of this chapter, when an Artistic Director was appointed who wanted to invest in the ‘local’ and the community around Adelaide. The uproar which met this change in direction was not heard anywhere so loudly as in Adelaide itself, where local artists felt penalised that their work was not being judged alongside their international contemporaries. In the words of the current South Australian Premier, Mike Rann MP: […] the Adelaide Festival has been established on the international arts calendar as an event of excellence […] hundreds of thousands of South Australians have joined artists and audiences from across Australia and the world in the Adelaide Festival experience. It’s a time when the national spotlight is on Adelaide and when its geography, performance spaces and, of course, its creative heart come into their own. (Rann 2004: 1)

He goes on to praise the 2004 Festival as it promised to uphold the fine traditions established over more than four decades as well as cutting-edge arts. Playing Culture Today each capital city in Australia runs its own festival – each with its own particular slant, offered at different times in the cultural calendar. The interesting thing is that they are all modelled on the Adelaide Festival. The Sydney Festival runs for two weeks in January – the height of the summer vacation time in Australia. As a result it attracts many Australians as well as overseas visitors wishing to escape the winter in the northern hemisphere. Since the Olympic Games the city can now boast a variety of venues, which can cater for large audiences, such as the Olympic Park stadium. The 2004 Sydney Festival specialised in

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new music, music theatre works, installations and cinematic music events as well as adventurous dance. The Brisbane Festival is usually held in mid-year – the best subtropical winter weather. In addition to the festivals for young people like Out of the Box and Five to Midnight, Brisbane is also the centre of the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music; the intention of the artistic director, Lyndon Terracini, is to bring remarkable music to Queensland and to present music from Queensland itself – using the model of uniting local and visiting artists and communities, often through long-term workshops and commissions. The Woodford/Maleny folk festival, held around New Year each year in the beautifully hilly countryside north of Brisbane, started out as a very humble festival attracting ‘fringe’ performers from all over the country. It now earns the state of Queensland millions of dollars each year, is opened by the premier and has launched some of the most innovative emerging music artists in the country. Funding is provided to create more comfortable living conditions (including tents and shelters) than in the past, and the tourists flock to it in their thousands. For this reason it is now regarded as an example of festival as creative industry. Sydney also offers Carnivale in September each year – presenting adventurous and innovative programmes at the Performance Space in Sydney. In addition to opening up local talent to a wide audience, it has recently secured special events such as Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s The Living Museum of Fetish/ized Identities. The Melbourne Festival, which is held in October each year, is dedicated to bringing works of artistic excellence to the city as well as showcasing outstanding local performance groups, such as Chunky Move. In 2003 it brought out director/choreographer Jan Fabre’s I am Blood, which stimulated much debate about the anxiety of formlessness – or performance which is all form and no content. Melbourne also boasts a Comedy Festival, which is more in tune with popular theatre trends, such as stand-up. Not to be forgotten on the west coast of Australia, the Perth Festival, held in summer, competes with the east coast festivals in trying to secure exclusive performing rights to some very special events, like Robert Wilson’s Dreamplay. The cost of importing such a large-cast production and holding on to it for Perth Festival audiences only was enormous. Little wonder that there has been a record long

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list of financial disasters following each Perth Festival. In similar vein Tasmania holds its festival ‘14 Days on the Island’ once every two years, as its contribution to the festival circuit. This very issue of not selling-on the productions to other capitals in Australia is crucial, and Festival Directors have to balance the ‘exclusivity’ of their festivals, which they believe will attract tourists to their cities in droves, with making them financially viable. There have been some disastrous ‘flops’ as it has taken Festival Directors some time in coming to the realization that there is money to be made in working more entrepreneurially in selling-on these productions. CONCLUSION Needless to say, things were vastly improved since the 2002 Festival as far as successful marketing, programming and box office are concerned. In the first week of the 2004 Festival the following report on the financial situation appeared in The Advertiser: The Adelaide Bank Festival box office is nearing the $3 million mark with an estimated 70,000 tickets sold. Festival general manager, Simon Bogle said: …yesterday the figure was 25% higher than its original box office budget. About 20% of sales had come from interstate or overseas patrons. The Fringe had sold more than 128,000 tickets worth $2.3 million. Sales since the Fringe opened on February 20 had been higher than for the same period in 2002 and accounted for more than half the total box office. (Bogle 2004)

There is no doubt that the Adelaide Bank 2004 Festival of Arts was a conscious effort on the part of the artistic director, Stephen Page, to restore box-office stability and popular support for the event, while his pivotal theme of celebrating the festival as a meeting place has been acclaimed as a smart focus. Whether this constitutes a great festival is not so clear. According to four-time festival artistic director, Anthony Steele (1974, 76, 78 and 80), the Adelaide Festival should challenge audiences and should not reflect popularism, although he does admit the biggest challenge is how to put together a comprehensive programme without terrifying the audience. For Steele: The most valuable function of festivals in general in Australia is to present the most challenging and provocative art of that moment to the audience…And yet the Adelaide Festival sits in a perilous position. Its status as a festival of

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international renown is threatened by competitors who have imitated the Adelaide model and expanded it. The Adelaide Festival, due to its size and available funds, can’t compete favourably with bigger arts festivals as a box office money-spinner; its true measure of worth must be its ability to define contemporary arts. (Steele 2004: 8-9)

Steele is confident that commercial pressures have not mutated the form of the festival; that it won’t be reduced to a populist event, where pressures to provide ‘entertainment’ outweigh an obligation to present great art. Robyn Archer, artistic director in 1998 and 2000, agrees with Steele: The primary objective of entertainment is to give the audience what they know and want. The primary objective of art is not to offer platitudes but to give us a version of the truth through art, to challenge what we think we already know, to overwhelm us with unfamiliar experiences of infinite beauty. (Archer 2004:9)

All talk of art and entertainment aside, the Adelaide Bank 2004 Festival of Arts was considered a huge success by the organisers for the following reasons: over 86 000 tickets were sold; over 60 performances sold out; attendances (including free events) were in excess of 290 000; the box office target was exceeded by 40%; 13% of Festival patrons were attending for the first time; 92% of patrons surveyed indicated that they were satisfied with the event. The Festival is estimated to have produced a total net economic benefit of $15.4 million in terms of income (Gross State Product). In this light even the programme was regarded favourably, as Festival Chairman, Ross Adler, commenting on the fact that the 2004 festival tripled the box office of 2002, said: In addition the city has been absolutely humming for the past 17 days. The city streets, hotels and both airlines enjoying capacity custom since it began…The program has been met with a tremendous response from audiences, and critics, and media coverage around the festival has been extremely positive. (Adler 2004)

Well we might ask how one measures the success of a festival. As we have seen here, the box office is a determining factor. Whether Page was as successful in ‘rekindling our spiritual consciousness’ through the ‘cultural knowledge ground’ of his festival is debatable. He certainly succeeded in bringing the hopes and dreams of Indigenous

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Australians to audiences in a most stimulating and meaningful way. There was no need for an international star-studded programme of contemporary multi-arts. Are there echoes of Peter Sellars here? Had Sellars started the ball rolling in trying to bring the ‘local’ to the Adelaide Festival, which Page adopted so successfully? It is hard to say, but one thing is very clear and that is that issues of power, finances and politics determine the success of a festival. _________________________ REFERENCES Adler, R. (2004) ‘Adelaide Festival a triumph!’ 14 March, http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/news/4013article.asp. Adsa Journal, 37. Archer, R. (2004) Interview with David Sly, The Festival of Now, in: The Adelaide Review, 9 March. Bogle, S. (2004) The Advertiser, 3 March. Cook, A. (2002) The Idler, 28 March. Lendon, N & Bonyhady, T (2004) Nexus Gallery News, Adelaide Bank 2004, Festival of Arts. Page, S. (2003) Media Release, 27 May, http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/welcome.asp. Programme notes (2002) Adelaide Arts Festival, 1-10 March. Programme notes (2004) Adelaide Bank 2004, Festival of Arts, RiverlanD. Rann, M. (2004) Booking Guide Adelaide Bank 2004, Festival of Arts (1). Ryan,D. (2001) The Messenger, 7 November. Ryan, D. (2002) The Idler, 28 February. Steele, A. (2004) Interview with David Sly, The Festival of Now, in: The Adelaide Review, March (8-9). The Advertiser (2002) 6 March. Thwaites, V. (2004) Media Release, Adelaide Bank 2004, Festival of Arts, Holy, Holy, Holy, 15 February.

HYBRID FESTIVALS. THE MICKERY THEATRE: IN SEARCH OF A DRAMATURGY OF FRAGMENTATION HENRI SCHOENMAKERS1

INTRODUCTION In an introductory article, ‘Festivals, Theatrical Events and Communicative Interactions’, I compared the characteristics of festivals and of single performances in order to define and recognise the variables that characterise festivals and which distinguish them from what was called a ‘single theatrical event’. This contribution will discuss hybrid festivals. We consider hybrid festivals as theatre performances and/or festivals with characteristics consisting of a mix of the prototypical characteristics of festivals and the so-called single theatrical events. With the help of the theoretical considerations from the introductory article, we can specify this in the following questions: – Is it possible to distinguish the two types of responsible instances characteristic of festivals: (a) the theatre makers, responsible for the single theatrical event, and (b) the festival organisers, responsible for the presentation structure within which the single theatrical events are performed? – Do the spectators or participants perceive the singular events and activities as part of a bigger presentation structure, for which an organiser is recognisable and responsible? – Are the events, activities, presentation structure fore-grounded within the context of activities? In order to discuss the theoretical considerations more specifically, examples of performances from the history of the Mickery Theatre in Amsterdam have been chosen. Between 1965 and 1991 this theatre presented about 500 of the finest examples of international innovative theatre to the Netherlands (see Mickery 1988, 1991; Schoenmakers et al 1992, 1996). Within the framework of its activities, the Mickery theatre experimented also with presentation structures other than just programming single performances one after the other. Therefore, a selection of performances, performance-like activities and festival-like-activities, which the Mickery Theatre organised or presented in its twenty-five years history, will be

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discussed. The director of the Mickery Theatre, Ritsaert ten Cate, was fascinated with new dramaturgies and new presentation structures, which present single theatrical events within a framework designed by the Mickery Theatre. He was fascinated particularly by collage and montage techniques as the dramaturgical principle. He designed performances or events in which he brought together different activities, for which an individual artist was responsible, in a new overall structure. His fascination led to some activities which blurred the traditional borderlines between single theatrical events and festivals. That is the reason we wish to discuss some of the activities in order to find out how we can characterise the events in that liminal area between single theatrical events and traditional festival structures. This aim gives us the possibility to discuss the diversity in festivals that the Mickery theatre has organised. The performances, events or structures which will be discussed are: 1. 1972 Grupo Tse: History of the Theatre 2. 1975 Fairground 3. 1980 Even Kijken / Look for a while 4. 1984 O Brave New World 5. 1984: Fairground 84 6. 1988: History of the Theatre (Part II) 7. 1989 Back 2 Back 8. 1991 Touch Time 1972: GRUPO TSE: HISTORY OF THE THEATRE In 1972 the Mickery Theatre moved from Loenersloot, a little village near Amsterdam, to Amsterdam, where Mickery started its activities with the French/Argentinean group, Grupo Tse, in a temporarily venue, a church. Grupo Tse, founded in 1966 in Buenos Aires, consisted of poets, plastic arts artists, dancers and actors. The group was located temporarily in Paris. Already in 1970 Mickery had presented two performances in its Loenersloot theatre: Dracula and Goddess. These performances, directed by Alfredo Rodrigo Arias, who also designed the costumes, became famous because of their stylised way of acting, supported by stylised costumes. Such a stylised aesthetic was also characteristic of the History of the Theatre. This shocked the critics in a positive way. They stated that they had not seen theatrical aesthetics with such precision in detail and such

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elegance in movement before. Every movement and every image was very formally organised. Moments of retardation emphasised the stylisation of the performance. In addition, the use of the voice and the speech delivery also had the precise formalism of an opera singer, even when it was the dialogue of spoken theatre. The performance went, in other words, many steps away from realistic characters and from a realistic presentation of actions. This form of theatre had the same innovative impact as the stylised and slow-motion theatre of images that Robert Wilson was producing in the same time with his Deafman Glance (1970). Critics considered The History of the Theatre as a unique event. One of the leading Dutch theatre critics, Jac Heijer (1994: 37), called it an attempt to kill the bourgeois theatre. However, the paradox is, he stated, that the murder weapon is the theatre itself, but in a perfect form. The plot of the performance is as follows: a Lady Speaker presents the history of the theatre from rituals to modern drama as a kind of fashion show. Sometimes Grupo Tse represented a period from the history of theatre by means of a single prop, for instance, a phallus of 1.50 meter high, as a symbol for archaic theatre forms. On other occasions a very short version, no longer than 10 or 15 minutes, of a famous drama would be shown. The spectator saw in this way mini-versions of Molière’s Femmes Savantes, Goethe’s Faust, Hugo’s Hernani, Shakespeare’s Macbeth (in only three minutes), and Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire. Grupo Tse presented each of those mini-performances in a very different acting style and aesthetic. It looked like a festival of highlights of European theatre. Theoretically speaking such a performance could have been a collage of mini-performances staged by different groups or theatre makers, as was the case with the five mini-plays that the Traverse Theatre Club from Edinburgh performed in one night in 1967.2 It was the theatre makers of Grupo Tse, however, who had designed and staged all those condensed plays. They were responsible for the different stylistic approaches as part of their total performance concept. This made it doubtless a single theatrical event and not a festival, and not even a hybrid festival. The unifying principle was as strong as in other montage performances. In this case, the unifying principle was a statement about stylistic changes in Western drama and theatre history.

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In fact, the structure of such a performance is a relatively normal one in the domain of the montage theatre. We can think of the historical montage-performances of Piscator in the 1920s, such as Hoppla wir Leben (1927). Or later in theatre history, we can think of the montage performances of Jan Fabre in the 1980s, performances such as Het is theater zoals te verwachten en te voorzien was. (It is the Kind of Theatre One Could Expect and Foresee) (1982) or De Macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden (The Power of Theatrical Follies) (1984). In such cases the same artistic concept leads to a collage of fragments, and for each of those fragments the theatre makers themselves are responsible. In addition, in the case of the History of the Theatre the foregrounding principle, so typical for festivals, did not play a role, since the performance was scheduled just as the other single theatrical events. 1975 FAIRGROUND Even if it had a montage structure as well, the performance Fairground (1975) had quite different characteristics. The aim of the Mickery Theatre since its origin in 1965 was to stimulate innovations in Dutch theatre. From 1967 onwards Mickery focused on showing innovations from the international theatre scene. That is why spectators in and around Amsterdam became very well informed about international developments. Mickery presented, for instance, groups such as Traverse and La Mama before their fame was more widespread. Nevertheless, the director of the Mickery Theatre, Ritsaert ten Cate, concluded already in the beginning of the 1970s that innovative theatre was becoming rare (Mickeryprogramma 1974). In order to continue the presentation of innovative theatre, he decided that the Mickery Theatre itself should produce innovative productions. This idea, however, was not in line with the subvention rules of the Dutch Ministry of Culture. The advisory board of the Ministry, the council for the arts, saw in Ten Cate a talented organiser of performances from abroad, but not a talented producer.3 In order to circumvent these rules the Mickery Theatre presented the production Fairground in disguise as produced by the Concept Theatre from Boston, USA, with Leonard Grehm as the director. After the performance became a big success – queues of spectators were waiting outside in front of the theatre in the hope to get a ticket – Mickery revealed that the Concept Theatre was the pseudonym for

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Mickery and Leonard Grehm the pseudonym for Ritsaert ten Cate, the real director. The performance consisted of a structure in which three different groups of spectators saw three different sequences of independent scenes. These scenes consisted of live acting, other activities and audiovisual media events. The three groups of spectators did not sit on permanent seats in the theatre, but were seated in boxes, which could be closed by curtains and projection screens. By means of hovercraft systems, these boxes could float around through the theatre. In this way the different groups of spectators saw the same scenes in a different order or different scenes at the same moment. In fact, those groups of spectators in the three boxes saw three different performances within the same space. It was the first performance in which Mickery used such a flexible seating system, which could change the perspectives of the spectators towards the actions the whole time. The performance was a big success in the eyes of the critics and in the eyes of the spectators. This was important for the Mickery Theatre. After it became clear that the Boston Theatre Group was a fabrication, and that Mickery had devised, organised and produced the performance, the Ministry of Culture could not do anything other than allow the Mickery theatre to produce performances itself. From now on Mickery did not have to restrict itself any longer to the presentation of existing forms of theatre from abroad. This change in policy led to a lot of performances, which the Mickery theatre produced, very often in collaboration with famous international theatre makers, like Shuji Terayama (Tokyo), Pip Simmons (London), the Epigonen theatre, and the later Need Company (Belgium), etc.... A speciality of the Mickery theatre in their own productions became the development of new presentation structures, the use of new technology and of new media, and the manipulation of audiences. For the discussion about festivals, it is important to notice that Mickery was not only responsible for the presentation structure and the selection of the different events, but also organised, produced and supervised the single events. Some of those events in fact did not have an artistic claim from the point of view of the performers at all. An example is a market merchant invited by the Mickery theatre to try to sell his grills in exactly the same way within the framework of the performance as he was doing outside the performance during the

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daytime at the market. For the spectators it was of course not clear that it was not an actor portraying a merchant of grills, but that it was a real merchant of grills, with the result that they did not buy anything. Another example is an amateur drum band, which until then only performed independently in public spaces. The performance of this band now became a single event in the structure of the performance. In this way such events became part of an artistic expression designed by the Mickery Theatre. The performance tends towards a festival structure and seems to consist of independent scenes and elements, but like the more traditional montage performances, for instance, the ones already mentioned before, there was a strong organising principle. That is the reason not to consider it a festival. Not even a hybrid festival, but just a collage or montage performance for which the Mickery theatre and its artistic director had the full responsibility. Artistic claims were, so to say, taken away from the individual theatre makers of the single events and transferred to the creator of the total event. Besides those characteristics, also the principle of foregrounding was in the case of Fairground not relevant: the performance was announced in the same way as other single performances.4 1980/1 EVEN KIJKEN / LOOK FOR A WHILE The presentation of a series of performances under the title Even Kijken, or in English Look for a while had quite a different structure. As usual, the Mickery Theatre was programming the whole season of 1980/1981 with many international performances. Within that programme Mickery organised – as celebration for its 10th birthday in Amsterdam – a programme of ten weeks during which it presented fifteen theatre groups with thirty different performances. In doing so, Mickery hoped also to become more visible in the Amsterdam cultural world. This was necessary, because in the course of the 1970s, the number of theatre activities in Amsterdam increased and the competition for the attention of the possible spectators became an issue in the marketing strategies of the theatre groups and theatres. Mickery had to care more about the marketing aspects of its programme. In this case Mickery applied a very focused and intensive marketing strategy. Part of it was posters along the streets in Amsterdam. ‘Live dangerously’ was, for instance, one of the stimulating remarks the sleepy inhabitants of Amsterdam suddenly

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could read in the morning when they were going to work. It was unclear, however, who tried to stimulate this dangerous behaviour. Most people probably never discovered that the Mickery Theatre was responsible for these kinds of announcements as a means to attract attention to the performances within the presentation structure of Look for a while. The performances were of a quite varied nature: live presentations, musical performances, multimedia events and so on.5 Mickery programmed the performances in contrasting presentations in order to stimulate a reflective attitude in the spectators. Special tickets encouraged frequent participation. The more often a spectator went to visit a performance of Look for a while, the cheaper the next ticket became. When a spectator had participated in five performances, he could get free tickets for all the other performance of this festival. In the programming of the performances and activities, the director of Mickery tried to evoke what he called a ‘surplus value’. This ‘surplus value’ would be the result of the reflection prompted by the programming of different themes, by contrasting perspectives or by different attitudes. The following example may illustrate this procedure. Michael Burrell presented the performance Hess, about the famous war criminal of the Second World War in the Spandau prison in Berlin. He showed the perspective of this war criminal. Hess was in that year 80 years old and the only prisoner in the Spandau prison in Berlin. Burrell emphasized how Hess was full of self-pity and without any understanding about his role in the Second World War. He even placed the spectators in a difficult situation when he, as Hess, asked them to help him with the rope with which he wanted to commit suicide. Nagel & Eversmann (1982) investigated the effects of this performance. Its reception research made clear that the spectators particularly liked the fact that the performance was able to let the spectators identify with a character with whom they in principle did not wish to identify at all. In this way, they admired the power of dramaturgical means, which were able to stimulate reflection on preexisting attitudes. This performance was contrasted with quite different performances. On the one hand, with The Survivor and the Translator performed by Leeny Sack, the daughter of a concentration camp survivor; on the other hand, with the video installation Dachau 1974, made by Beryl Korot. This video installation showed a collage of

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images of the Dachau concentration camp, as it looked in 1974, as a ground in which tourists were walking around. Typical for this festival is the kind of organisation of the single performances, for which individual artists are responsible, whereas the programmers are responsible for the framework of the presentation and for the contrasts and reflections elicited by such an organisation. The difference between the organisers of the presentation structure and the responsibility of the artists for the single events remained clear in the perception of the spectators. In addition, the principle of foregrounding is here applied. The festival structure distinguished the programming of the activities during those weeks from the ‘normal’ programming in the rest of the year. What the example illustrates very well is that a dramaturgically organised presentation structure with contrast and correspondence relations between the separate events may lead, at least according to the responsible organisers, to ‘surplus value’. The critics, however, did not focus on this aspect. They did not discuss this ‘surplus value’ and restricted themselves mainly to the quality of the single performances (Brink 1981). However, from the point of view of the participation of spectators Look for a while was such a success that critics spoke of a ‘Shadow Holland Festival’ (Lambregts 1981). 1983 O BRAVE NEW WORLD Three years later the Mickery Theatre opened the season again with such a kind of presentation structure as Look for a while, now under the title O Brave New World, taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The main differences from Look for a while were that Mickery not only presented existing theatrical or musical programmes, but also commissioned events specific for this presentation structure. It commissioned, for instance, choreography (Bianca Dillen, Shot), a computer design (Lambertus Lambregts) and a computer play (Jeffrey Shaw). Different from Look for a while, too, was that the thematically contrasting presentations were now very rare and that Mickery did not restrict itself to theatrical events but, for instance, also published a little book A man alone, Jean Genet in Beiroet. It was an eyewitness report about the mass murder in Beirut in the Palestinian camps Sabra and Chatila in September 1982. Mickery labelled its activities within this presentation structure as ‘messages from society’ (Mickery 1983). Common for the

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presentations during these twenty weeks was that the borderlines between theatre and other arts and between theatre and daily life were blurred, which was to stimulate reflection about the concepts of theatricality and performativity. Urban Sax was a group of thirty saxophonists and performers around the Parisian architect Gilbert Artman. Dressed in white overalls and white hoods, as beings from another space, they presented their music and noise-like activities in and around the New Church in Amsterdam. Doing so, the performers intruded into the daily life of the inhabitants of Amsterdam, who did not have an idea about what exactly was going on. Another example of blurring borderlines between theatre and reality was the staged interviews with twelve persons from the Dutch cultural world about life and art in a public presentation in the Mickery theatre under the title Galgemaal, (Last Meal). The public setting of those interviews were to emphasise how private persons start a kind of role-playing in order to present an image of themselves in front of the audience. A quite different activity within this presentation structure was that Mickery had invited people to send in their private wedding films. The performance artist Edmondo Zanolini made a montage out of those films and presented the result within the framework of O Brave New World as a short Wedding Film Festival. Such a festival should illustrate, according to Mickery, how a private and intimate activity gets mixed up with social role-playing and adopts the conventions and codes of the mass media in a medial presentation. In addition, professional theatre companies participated, such as the Liverpool Playhouse, Bob Caroll (New York/ San Francisco) and Squat Theatre. The members of Squat Theatre, the company of Peter Halazs and Anna Koos, did not only deal with the theme of fiction and reality in its performance Mr Dead and Mrs Free. Also in the reality of their own lives, they had suspended the borderlines between fiction and reality. They were literally living in the environment of the theatre performance. At the time of the performance, the spectators visited them in their living and performing space. Looking at the way this series of events was organised and presented, it is easy to conclude that we are not looking at a characteristically structured festival. For example, at times there is no

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clear division of responsibility between the festival organisers and the theatre makers responsible for the individual events, since Mickery produced or collaborated in the production of 9 out of 15 events presented and the responsibilities of the festival organisers and theatre makers often overlapped or were shared over the period. This would indeed be a strong argument for viewing this particular event as a hybrid festival. However, viewed from the perspective of the theatregoers, who would naturally not be aware of the interwoven responsibilities and only see it as a structured series of presentations over a twenty-week period, it may also be argued that the presentation as a whole has the structure of a characteristically structured festival. 1984 FAIRGROUND 84 With Fairground 84 Ten Cate revived two principles that he had used before. First, the principle of the boxes in which the spectators were seated, and which – as in the Fairground performance nine years before – could move around in the theatre space. Second, the principle of the mini-plays, as performed in 1967, when Traverse in collaboration with Mickery performed five new short plays as a onenight festival. Fairground 84 was for Ten Cate, even more than his first Fairground production, an experiment with structures. In that sense it was as a continuation of his experiments with the presentation structures of Look for a While and O Brave New World, in which he programmed short performances complementary, or in contrast, to each other. As was the case with the mini-plays in 1967, he wanted to give an impression of developments in the United Kingdom and invited some English playwrights and theatre makers to present new plays. Traverse Theatre came with scenes from three young Scottish playwrights, ICA (London) performed a new play of Caryl Churchill (Midday Sun), Chris Jordan (ex-Pip Simmons Theatre Group), Trevor Stuart and Moira House created a musical show. As with the first Fairground production, the spectators were seated in hovercraft boxes, now measuring 9 by 2.50 meters, seating 50 spectators. Again, the boxes could be closed by means of curtains and projection screens. And again, the spectators experienced a sense of loss about the speed and the distances, when the boxes moved around. This time Mickery had found enough sponsors to rent a huge hall on the outskirts of Amsterdam in which these boxes could be

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manoeuvred. Spectators from the three boxes saw a collage from the different scenes and fragments of the performances in different orders. One of the critics described the atmosphere in one of the boxes as follows: ‘A festively dressed girl steps into the boxes to offer the spectators sweets. An accordion player invites the spectators to sing with him. However, community singing is less familiar in Holland than in England, but after some hesitation, the atmosphere in the box is becoming the one of a school journey ’ (Amerongen 1984). The audience was very enthusiastic.6 Every night was a full house. The theatre critics were less convinced. Some had the feeling that spectacle played too big a role. Not only the dominant technology, but also means like the smoke in the theatre led to some (negative) associations with popular music presentations (Kottman 1984; Vrooom 1984). Others considered the single scenes of the different theatre makers not very convincing as examples of a future avant-garde (Kottman 1984; Scholten 1984). The element of ‘surplus value’, which again played an important role in motivating Ritsaert ten Cate to choose this presentation structure, the critics did not discuss and probably did not recognize. Regarding the festival question, we think this performance can be considered as a hybrid festival. On the one hand, there is a very clear presentation structure, for which the Mickery theatre is responsible. Mickery is responsible too for the selection of the events shown within the framework of this presentation structure. On the other hand, there are the theatre makers who are responsible for the presented scenes. The inclusion of those single events in a very dominant presentation structure, which integrated those single events into a totally new pre-programmed experience, supports the theory of a hybrid festival. Besides, and probably more important, unlike prototypical festival structures, the spectators do not have the possibility to make their own selection out of the single theatrical events. Finally, yet importantly, we are not dealing with an activity for which the foregrounding principle plays an important role. 1988 HISTORY OF THE THEATRE (PART II) Four years after Fairground 84 Mickery used the principle of the boxes again. For Ten Cate this system offered still ‘a new kind of theatre, a new dramaturgical interpretation tool’ (Cate 1988b). He

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considered History of the Theatre as an ‘exhibition of live theatrical material’. As was the case with Fairground 84, Mickery did not use its own theatre, but had rented a huge space, a shed in the harbour of Rotterdam, which had for some time been in use for artistic events. This transfer to Rotterdam was the result of Mickery’s problems with the lack of interest for cultural activities, which had led to big cuts in subsidies. Ten Cate was considering leaving Amsterdam in order to transfer Mickery to Rotterdam. In fact, the organisation of this performance in Rotterdam was an experiment in this direction. The construction of the boxes – this time four - was the same as in Fairground 84. The boxes, with seating facilities for around 30 spectators, could again be closed by means of curtains and projection screens. They were now equipped with monitors as well. Sometimes the boxes parked besides each other, with the same frontal position of the spectators as in a traditional theatre, all with the same sightlines towards the actions. At other moments the position of the boxes was quite different: the spectators saw the same actions from various angles, or saw even quite different actions. Again, Mickery was responsible for the organisation of the presentation structure and for the selection of the theatre makers. As organiser responsible for the activities and events into the whole of the presentation structure, Mickery had chosen Aldo Rostagno. Ritsaert ten Cate and the dramaturg of Mickery, Jan Zoet, assisted him (Cate 1988a). For this performance Mickery had invited theatre makers who belonged to the famous international avant-garde whose activities Mickery had shown before, such as Squat Theatre, Wooster Group, Stuart Sherman, Need Company and John Jesurun. Jesurun described how the beginning of the performance always caused excitement, when the boxes started to move (Scott 1989). Then the journey for the boxes started. From the perspective of one of the boxes, the first stop is in front of a screen of Squat Theatre, which presents the opening scene of L’Train to Eldorado. It represents an environment of two people sitting in bed, while a film projection is taking place. The next stop shows huge dummies of, among other things, dinosaurs. It is a fragment of the performance Micropolis of Thodora Skipitares (New York), a mini-play about maxi-animals. Then the spectators hear an interview with the theatre makers Peter Sellars and Liz Lecompte

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(Wooster Group) about the future of the theatre, after which they watch a film made by Ken Kobeland, with images of the performance of the Wooster Group Death of St. Anthony. At the next stop the spectators are confronted with the minimal theatre of Stuart Sherman, who is manipulating little objects. It is a fragment from his Suitcase Performances, an interpretation of Hamlet. Then the boxes park next to each other to watch the first results of the work in progress of the Need Company for the performance Ça Va. After this scene the Drag Queen Ethyl Eichelberger, in an extravagantly colourful costume, presents some of her exalted monologues, which she was successfully performing in New York clubs: Iocaste, Boy Crazy, or She Married her Son, Lucrezia Borgia and Cordelia’s Song. The end of the performance shows some film scenes by John Jesurun, among others, the one in which a young actor is asking to be freed from the film world in order to be able to return to the real world. In the context of the performance, these scenes become a metaphor about the spectators of the performance chained into the theatrical world, which they will leave very soon for their daily reality again. The whole performance was a collage of fragments, without a connecting storyline. It was more the dramaturgical organising principle of a circus night than of traditional theatre. The spectators liked the performance. Peter Eversmann, who carried out reception research, concluded that the spectators, who experienced the system with the hovercraft boxes for the first time, liked the performance more than the spectators who had already experienced this kind of presentation structure (Eversmann 1993). How important the environmental aspects of the presentation structure were is becoming clear, in that the spectators in the only box upholstered with red plush and decorative cosy lights had a more pleasant night than the spectators in the other boxes. They found the performance more exciting, more interesting, more complex, more relaxing, better and more beautiful (Eversmann 1996: 237). Are we dealing here with a festival? As was the case with Fairground 85, we conclude also here, with the same arguments, that it is a hybrid festival. It lacks the clear division in responsibilities between the organiser responsible for the presentation structure and the theatre makers responsible for the single events. It lacks also the foregrounding principle of a ‘normal’ festival. In addition, and most important of all, the spectators are not able to make their own

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selection out of the different single events which are brought together within Mickery’s montage. 1989 BACK 2 BACK Back 2 Back had as subtitle ‘Opposites in form. Dilemmas of choice’. The aim was to present vital new groups, even groups that Mickery would not have programmed outside such a presentation structure. The structure is in fact the same as Look for a while from 1981. Mickery had rented the Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam and programmed two different performances each night. Again, Ten Cate expected a ‘surplus value’ by means of this way of programming: ‘two performances to create one experience… essentially the experience of the two will lead to the reflection of one’ (Cate 1989). Mickery was focusing on the newest developments in the avant-garde scene and had chosen groups like La Tartana Teatro (Madrid), Ivan Stanev & Studiotheater im Pep (Sofia/München), Bak-truppen (Bergen), El Hakawati (East Jerusalem), Societa Raffaello Sanzio (Cesena) and an old acquaintance, The Drawing Legion (Iowa City). Because the same principles were used as in Look for a while the conclusion regarding the festival question is the same. We are dealing here with a ‘normal’ festival structure, again with a strong emphasis on dramaturgical principles in the organisation of this festival. 1991 TOUCH TIME Touch Time was the last activity of the Mickery, organised as kind of good-bye party to celebrate the end of the Mickery theatre. Ten Cate had decided to stop Mickery’s activities, after unsuccessful attempts to develop a new profile for the Mickery theatre at a time in The Netherlands that more interesting and innovative theatre performances were being produced than Mickery could find in other countries. The structure of Touch Time was the same as Back 2 Back, and thus as Look for a while. The duration was 12 days, showing 17 performances. Mickery again had the artistic responsibility for the selection of the groups and the organisation of the presentation structure. The theatre makers of these groups had the artistic responsibility for their own events. As appropriate for a good-bye party, Mickery had invited many old friends, and also groups who represented the actual diversity in theatrical aesthetics. Old friends

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from Mickery’s past were, among others, Bread and Puppet Theatre, Love Theatre (Peter Halazs, former Elephant Theatre, and former Squat Theatre), The Wooster Group. The actual diversity in theatrical aesthetics was represented by groups like The Los Angeles Poverty Department, Bak-Truppen and a range of happening-like activities as the installation Ten Cate and Simon ten Holt had made for the opening night (Horizon). A non-Western touch was achieved with the Hawaii Group Halau O’Kekkuhi, which presented a traditional ritual dance performance, handed down from one generation to the next. Ten Cate had discovered this group at the Los Angeles Festival that Peter Sellars had organised in 1990. Characteristic of this festival was that Sellars showed Western avant-garde theatre besides expressions of popular culture, and traditional performative activities from nonWestern cultures. Ten Cate was very impressed and inspired by this festival. The fact that at Mickery’s deathbed he programmed this traditional non-Western performance at the end of Touch Time can be interpreted as a beacon for the direction in which the theatre, according to him, should develop: less Eurocentric or Western-centric and more attention for other cultures and their traditional values. The similarities between Touch Time, Back 2 Back and Look for a While, as mentioned in the beginning of this paragraph lead, regarding the festival question, to the same conclusion, namely that we are dealing with a ‘normal’ festival structure. In other words, Mickery closed its existence in 1991 not with an example of the new dramaturgical presentation structures it had been dealing with so intensively for such a long time. CONCLUSIONS The examples which have been discussed make clear that Mickery, in its 25 years of existence from 1965 until 1991, was often involved in the organisation, exploration and development of new presentation structures. On the one hand, Mickery used the traditional festival structure, but with a strong emphasis on the programming of interesting parallels and contrasts between the different single events in order to evoke for the spectators what Ten Cate called ‘surplus value’. In this way, he put a strong emphasis on dramaturgical principles in the programming of such festivals and placed a strong responsibility in the hands of the festival organisers. On the other hand, Mickery used montage principles within the single events as, for

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instance, was the case in the first Fairground performance of 1975. Between those extremes Mickery developed what can be called ‘hybrid festival performances’. These are characterised by the fact that Mickery designed a very dominant presentation structure, which was not just a framework within which it showed the single events, but this framework itself had an important impact on the emotional experience of the spectator. Because of such a dominant framework, the responsibility of the theatre makers for the separate single events seemed to disappear within the unity of the total experience produced by the presentation structure. This was also a consequence of the technical innovations Mickery had introduced to support the presentation structure, namely the hovercraft boxes which freed the spectators from their passive situation in which they are able to look at the action from only one point of view. After centuries in which spectators were sitting in the same position facing the action during a performance, the sightlines of the spectators in relation to the action became flexible and dynamic. This offered the theatre makers and festival organisers the possibility to use the dynamic spectator position and the differences in the spectator position as an aesthetic theatrical means, particularly to fragment the view of the spectators, and to emphasise that not everybody is seeing the actions at the same moments. Most decisive for the difference between a festival and a hybrid festival is that spectators in the case of hybrid festivals are not able to select one of the single events incorporated in the presentation structure. They buy a ticket for the presentation structure as a whole, including all the single events incorporated in this structure. They cannot even choose the box in which they will be seated, nor the specific selection of the single events or the order in which they will see these events. The social control over attendance at the whole performance is even greater than in normal performances, since spectators who do not like the events and want to leave the box have to walk through the performance space, and take the risk of becoming part of the theatrical actions watched by one or more of the groups of spectators in the boxes. Regarding the differences between festivals and hybrid festivals, the example of O Brave New World was interesting. We can draw different conclusions, depending on whether we look at the production side of the presentation structure and the theatrical events,

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or at the reception side. In the first case, the conclusion was that we are dealing with a hybrid festival and in the second case that we are dealing with a festival. We think that it is typical of the theatrical arts and media that those two perspectives can lead to quite different conclusions. The dramaturgy of fragmentation applied to single performances, festivals and the hybrid festivals was one of Mickery’s attempts to develop a dramaturgy for theatrical arts away from hermetic storylines and away from the closed and clear conflict and character structures of traditional theatre. In this way, the different activities we have discussed played a role in the development of the so-called ‘new dramaturgy’ in which the spectator is no longer the one who simply watches all the activities and actions. The spectator becomes a subject, who can only see fragments of the world around him, often fragments which build a contradictory image. What is important, however, is that Mickery tried to stimulate the spectators to reflect on their perceptions and their fragmentary experiences. They are stimulated to build their own subjective whole, in the knowledge that other spectators see different fragments and may build different constructions and different subjective wholes. _________________________ NOTES 1

I would like to thank Jacqueline Martin for her comments and her help in improving the quality of my English. 2 This bill with five plays was produced by Ritsaert ten Cate (for Mickery) and Max Stafford Clark (for Traverse), who also directed all the plays. The plays were Cover Story, Trio, The Gymnasium, Natural Causes and 26 Efforts at Pornography. Only the author of Trio, James Saunders was well known. Traverse had devised this project with mini-plays as a project aimed at promoting authors to write for the theatre. 3 Advies van de Raad voor de Kunst aan minister Van Doorn, 4-3-75, kenmerk T75.36/3 4 This conclusion is the reason that a similar project (Cloud Cuckooland – 1979), in which the boxes were used, and Mickery collaborated with only one theatre maker, Shuji Terayama, is not discussed in this article (see Schoenmakers 1979). 5 The events programmed within Look for a While were the following: Beeldend Theater (Amsterdam): Entree; Aldo Rostagno (Florence): Four Performances; Bil Irwin/Doug Skinner (San Francisco): Murdoch I and Murchoch II; Liverpool Playhouse/Patrick Malahide (Liverpool): Judgment; Bob Caroll (New York/San Francisco): The Dirt Show; Michael Burrell (Cambridge, UK): Hess; Leo Kern (Freiburg): Rose Schweige Still; Leeny Sack c.s. (New York): The Survivor and the Translator; Mollie Davis/Sage Cowles c.s. (Minneapolis): Sage Sycle/Great Circles,

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Geat Planes; Bricolage (Philadelphia): Amazing Grace; Stuart Sherman (New York): Language; Kalenich/DeLorenzo (New York): Dreambelly; Laöemocjh/DeLorenzo (New York): The Ruth Fooser Show; Theatre of Mistakes (London): Going; Joelle Leandre (Paris): Duo with Contrabass; Theatre of Mistakes/Sherman/Mickery (London/New York/Amsterdam): Hamlet. 6 The manager of the Mickery, Michel Bezem, in a letter to the board of the Mickery Theatre 31-12-1984.

REFERENCES Amerongen, E. van (1984). ‘Fairground ’84, een verjaardagsfeest voor 1984’ in: Hervormd Nederland Magazine, June 16. Brink, N. (1981). ‘Hoeveel meerwaarde biedt Mickery?’ in: De Groene Amsterdammer 11/1 Cate, R. ten (1988a) History of the Theatre (Part II), July 22. Cate, R. ten (1988b). Paper for the board of the Mickery ‚Een ‚Tussenbalans’ ontwikkeling beleid. Stand van zaken geplande voorstellingen en projecten. Fairground: History of the Theatre (Part II) October 25. Cate, R. ten (1989). ‘A text for 6 performances’ in: Two and Two Magazine, programmabijlage, October. Eversmann, P. (1993). Breaking Down the House. Tijdschrift voor Theaterwetenschap, 9, 33, 21-36. Eversmann, P. (1996). De ruimte van het theater. Een studie naar de invloed van de theaterruimte op de beleving van voorstellingen door de toeschouwer. Amsterdam Dissertation: Amsterdam University. Heijer, J. (1994). Een keuze uit zijn artikelen. Amsterdam: International Theatre & Film Books / Stichting Pensioenfonds voor het Nederlands Toneel. Kottman, P. (1984). ‘Fairground gaat in rook op’ in: NRC Handelsblad June 7. Lambregts, L. (1981). Even Kijken, Verslag. Amsterdam. Mickery (1983). Programme, August 9. Mickery (1988). Pictorial – 1965-1991, Amsterdam: Stichting Mickery Workshop and International Theatre Bookshop. Mickery (1991). Pictorial II – 1988-1991, Amsterdam: Stichting Mickery Workshop and International Theatre Bookshop. Mickeryprogramma (1975). 9th year, 34/3 March. Nagel, N. & Eversmann, P. (1982) Hess, een receptie-onderzoek bij de voorstelling NeEd , & Peter ‘Hess’ van Michael Burrell, Amsterdam/Utrecht: Instituut voor Theaterwetenschap, 1982. (Receptie-onderzoek en voorstellings analyse – 7). Schoenmakers, H. (1979). Cloud Cuckooland, deel 2. Mickeryproject in samenwerking met de groep Tenjo Sajiki, Tokyo. Een studie naar de reacties van het publiek. Amsterdam: Mickery (Mickery Dossier 6) Schoenmakers, H. (1992). Mickerytheater. In: Brauneck, Manfred and Schneilin, Gérard (Hrsg.) Theaterlexikon: Begriff und Epochen, Bühnen und Ensembles. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rororo, 607-608. Schoenmakers, H. & Jager, E. (1996). 1972: Mickery verhuist van Loenersloot naar Amsterdam.De buitenlandse fringe in Amsterdam. In: R.L. Erenstein (Ed.) Een theatergeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Tien eeuwen drama en theater in

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Nederland en Vlaanderen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 760767. Scholten, H. (1984). ‘Mickery blameert zich met gedoe tussen de schuifdozen’ Nieuwsblad van het Noorden June 6. Scott, C. M. (1989). ‘John Jesurun talks to Colleen Scott’ in Two and Two magazine, Vol.1:2. Vroom, N. (1984). ‘Fairground, beschaafde kermis’ De Waarheid June 8.

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PART THREE THEATRE FESTIVALS AS NATIONAL EVENTS

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IDEOLOGY IN MOVEMENT AND A MOVEMENT IN IDEOLOGY: THE DEUTSCHE TANZFESTSPIELE 19341 DAVID J. BUCH & HANA WORTHEN

Only seven weeks after Hitler’s rise to power on 30 January 1933 the first concentration camps (Dachau, Oranienburg, Buchenwald) were filling up with his political opponents. With the enactment of the ‘Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums’, passed on 7 April 1933, people with views contrary to National Socialism were taken into so called ‘protective custody’; some of them would never return. This law also prevented Jews and political dissidents from serving in government posts of any kind, and from participating in official cultural events. At the same time the Reichskanzler enjoyed a considerable increase in public support, and membership in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the ‘Nazi Party’, henceforth NSDAP) tripled in three months to 2.5 million members (Broszat 1992: 253). As the National Socialist state began to take shape, so did the role of a new ‘official culture’, along with the emigration of ‘undesirable’ intellectuals and artists who could no longer participate in that culture. The new Ministry for the People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda (henceforth RMVP),2 headed by Dr Joseph Goebbels, established tight control over cultural activities and sponsored prominent public events. One of these events, the Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934, intended to introduce audiences to ‘the New German Dance’, which was aimed to impart a sense of national identity associated with a mythic German Volks community, shared by the performers and the audience. These goals were already present in Goebbels’s speech ‘Das deutsche Theater und seine Aufgaben’, delivered before a group of German stage directors, and published in part in Der Autor in May 1933. Here the propaganda minister placed the mythic Volk in the centre of German culture, marking a sharp break with the liberal, individualistic art of the Weimar Republic. He called for a new movement in art that either supports the National Socialistic state ‘or does not exist at all’ (Goebbels 1-2). At the same time the Tanzfestspiele also focused on the future: ‘A number of aspiring talents would show the path that the young have taken to the

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new German artistic dance.’3 This article will attempt to analyse the Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 in its historical context, particularly as a ‘theatrical event’. This approach requires an interrogation into the nature of the communication between stage and auditorium as well as the circumstances in which this communication takes place (Sauter 2000: 2). The evidence for assessing this communication consists primarily of letters, reports and reviews in both professional journals and newspapers. The context will demonstrate that the ‘New German Dance’ celebrated in the Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 was in fact rooted in the Ausdruckstanz of the Weimar Republic. As defined by the festival literature, the ‘New German Dance’ was a loose concept at best, and more of an ideological stance than a coherent artistic movement. The disconnection between the concept and the reality of the dances (and music) produced at the festival would be reflected in a number of ways that reveal the underlying tension between the artists and the fascist state they served. Some of the ‘New German Dances’ that were created especially for this festival have not been the subject of critical analysis in the secondary literature. In investigating these aspects, the chapter will give the reader a sense of the complexities and ambiguities within this festival and within the artistic and political issues confronting its participants. * The Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 was scheduled for the preChristmas season (Dec. 9-16), an optimal time to attract audiences to the theatre. The wording Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 (comparable events had previously occurred within irregular, international festivals called ‘Tänzerkongresse’ held in Magdeburg in 1927, Essen in 1928 and Munich in 1930) implied an annual celebration of specifically German dance.4 The implication of an annual festival was realised the following year with the second Deutsche Tanzfestspiele (the year after that an international dance festival and competition was held as a part of the Olympic Games in Berlin). In keeping with the holiday season, special events were offered for children. The central location for the Tanzfestspiele in the capital city of Germany was also telling. The Theater am Horst-Wessel-Platz, known as the Volksbühne, was the main venue. The building had a longstanding connection to modern dance: during the Weimar Republic

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the Berliner Volksbühne was considered one of the leading stages for modern German dance. Here dancers demonstrated their art in front of the most sophisticated audience and critics in Germany. The political tradition of the Volksbühne had in fact been diametrically opposed to the ideals of fascism. The theatre was built and directed by the Volksbühnenverein, whose leadership included the communist Erwin Piscator. The theatre aimed to support the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ (people’s community) and offered tickets at low prices. The NSDAP leadership, who also claimed to embody the spirit of the German Volk, would exploit this association after taking over the government in 1933.5 The final public event of the festival, dedicated to German children, took place in the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Thus the Tanzfestspiele 1934 culminated in a performance at Germany’s most prestigious stage for opera and ballet. A private celebration for the participants and sponsors, given by the organisation Kamaradschaft deutscher Künstler, formally ended the festival ‘mit einem Sieg Heil auf den Führer’ (Böhme 1934: 12). Coordinated with the dance activities, the National Gallery presented an exhibition Der Tanz in der Kunst (Dance in Art) and a smaller exhibition in the theatre entitled ‘Dance in Photography’, organised by the photographer Charlotte Rudolph. An intense advertising campaign started two weeks prior to the festival, broadcasting radio interviews with the prominent dancers and choreographers, and producing a propaganda film.6 At least four extensive newspaper articles were published in connection with the event,7 each occupying a two-page spread with impressive photographs of some of the dancers. A festival book with essays was also published (see below). The organisers of the festival intended that pieces from the Tanzfestspiele would be performed on tour throughout greater Germany and abroad. This would be a reverse of the usual process for modern dance performances during the Weimar Republic, when dances were first tested in the provinces and only performed in the capital after having received acclaim elsewhere. The new ‘official culture’ now required a centralised source for German art, one that would emanate almost exclusively from the capital.

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Figure 1. The cover of the Tanzfestspiele 1934 Program. Courtesy of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Wigman-Archiv 51. Copyright Georg-KolbeMuseum, Berlin.

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Heralded by German critics as the ‘first great representative dance event of the New Germany’,8 the sponsors asserted that the event would demonstrate ‘German dance as the bearer of German culture’, possessing ‘the spirit of the new German life’.9 But this assertion was illusory and essentially propaganda. The background of the leading dancers and their art was in fact ‘Ausdruckstanz’ (also called ‘freier Tanz’, ‘neuer Tanz’, ‘German dance’, and ‘expressionist dance’10), developed during the Weimar years. This background emerges more clearly when the Tanzfestspiele is viewed as a continuation of the dance congresses in the years 1927 to 1930. In fact, the term ‘Tanzfestspiele’ was first used for these events. Every one of the choreographers in the 1934 event participated in the earlier congresses, and many of the dances in the Tanzfestspiele in 1934 originated during the earlier period. But there were differences as well. Unlike the earlier dance congresses, the 1934 event had no sessions devoted to oral presentations. Discussions were also eliminated, and with them the lively, contentious and controversial disputes over the goals and direction of modern dance. As in the political sphere, the ‘New German state’ had no need for democratic dialogue or dialectics. A second distinction concerns the change from an international to a national event. Foreign dancers and choreographers, who had been welcomed in the previous congresses, were not invited in 1934. The participants were now supposed to be exclusively German,11 reflecting the new emphasis on national identity promoted by the Nazis. This emphasis, however, was in fact limited to the participants and not to the content of the performances, as will be discussed shortly. A third distinction was the elimination of Jewish participants, who had formerly played a significant role in dance during the Weimar Republic. One critic noted with pleasure that many of the Jewish people previously on stage were now confined to the audience.12 In conformity to the contemporary racial laws eliminating Jews from German cultural life, artists of the Tanzfestspiele were required to prove Aryan origin. But as in other areas of German society exceptions were made to the rule (the Jewish genealogy of the prominent ‘German’, actually Austrian, composer Johann Strauss, whose music was used in the Tanzfestspiele, was suppressed during the Third Reich). The prominent dancer Gret Palucca had a Jewish grandmother, a fact that appears to have gone unnoticed at this time.13

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In addition, the festival book invoked the authority of the leading dance historian Curt Sachs who, being Jewish, had emigrated in 1933. ORGANISATIONAL PRINCIPLES AND STRUCTURE German artistic dance […] will die if the Ministry of Propaganda does not intervene at the last minute.14

On 12th July 1934 Otto von Keudell, an advisor of Goebbel’s, met with under-secretary Walther Funk, who agreed to Keudell’s plan to rescue modern dance from its financial difficulties and to integrate it into the cultural politics of the RMVP.15 A typical example of NSDAP rhetoric, Keudell’s assessment of the importance of German artistic dance for the fascist state favours mystical rapture over logical coherence.16 Keudell saw the beginning of German artistic dance as occurring around 1900, and he named Rudolf von Laban as its founder.17 While these statements were not exactly false, Keudell simplified a complex and politically mixed history, one that began in the old German Empire and flowered in the Weimar Republic. Among Keudell’s recommendations was ‘the developing of a great task for the German artistic dance’18 that required a special celebratory ‘week of German artistic dance’.19 This would become the Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934. The initial plan was to sponsor the Tanzfestspiele with 90 000 Reichmarks, but this amount would be cut to a little under 60 000. Keudell estimated that about 40 dancers would be involved in the project. Three leading personalities of ‘Ausdruckstanz’ – Laban, Mary Wigman and Dorothee Günther – would each produce a new group dance (‘Gruppentanzwerk’) with 1015 dancers. Keudell also wanted the festival to include solo performances from the outstanding German virtuosos of the day, Gret Palucca, Harald Kreutzberg and the duo of Alice Uhlen and Alexander von Swaine. Keudell provided yet another compelling reason for the festival, one with political implications: an invitation had been issued to Laban, Wigman, and Günther by the Italian government to participate in an international dance competition in Venice in September 1934. While the competition was eventually deferred until 1936, Keudell argued that this was a timely opportunity for the ministry to use German artistic dance (in yearly festivals) as a stepping stone to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.20

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Sometime after this meeting the RMVP established an organisation responsible for executive and artistic direction of the Tanzfestspiele, called the Deutsche Tanzbühne. Goebbels gave the leading responsibility for the organisation to Laban,21 who travelled throughout Germany to select the participants, particularly the dancers and groups not mentioned by Keudell. Laban’s informal letter of invitation to Gret Palucca demonstrates that by late August he was soliciting participants.22 In this letter Laban specifically asked that she perform her ‘sieghafte’ (triumphant) solo dances in the festival. He also intimated future financial support if she would create new ‘large group dances in the grand style’. Laban promised Palucca that her participation in the Tanzfestspiele would be only the first in a series of future events financed by the Third Reich. According to the formal invitation letter to Palucca from the festival,23 a kind of jury met on 11-12 November 1934 to view some of the dances, making their final decision on 15 November. Palucca, Yvonne Georgi and Laban’s group were asked to perform at this time.24 * The festival literature made a number of claims for its raison d’etre, all consistent with the propaganda function of the sponsor. The statement on the first page of the festival programme is worth reciting in full: German Dance is diverse in its forms. However, this variety reveals a fundamental unified strength that springs from our essence. When we also present dances that appear to be rooted in foreign folk rhythms from the multicoloured orient or other styles, it will always remain German art performed by German dancers. We Germans are often described as coarse and without grace, and yet the freshness of the German temperament and the depth of the German soul have often conquered the world, not only through music and poetry but also through the art of dance.25

One should note the aggrandising of Germanness, so that anything performed by a German necessarily becomes German. The assertion of unification, the ubiquitous ‘we’ and the invoking of negative German stereotypes by non-Germans are all found in the pernicious propaganda of the Third Reich. The image on the same page, serving as the ‘logo’ of the event, was a photograph of Georg Kolbe’s celebrated bronze statue,

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‘Tänzerin’ (1912, National Gallery, Berlin). Kolbe’s work would later be appropriated as part of the accepted academic style in the Third Reich.26 His vulnerable nude dancer, in a spiralling movement with outstretched arms and head thrown back (see Figure 1), contrasts with the lithograph of the prominent nineteenth-century Austrian dancer, Fanny Elßler, placed on the last page of the programme. Susan A. Manning has suggested that these juxtaposed images create the illusion of an historical connection between ‘Deutscher Tanz’, classicism and romantic ballet. At the same time this imagery erases the historical connection between the choreographers of the festival and the Weimar artistic experiment, ‘Ausdruckstanz’ (Manning 1993: 175).27 This is yet another manifestation of the same kind of historical ‘amnesia’ that the National Socialists required of their artistic and cultural productions. The festival programme book (Laban 1934), made available during the event and containing essays by Laban and leading dancers, musicians and critics, developed a number of ideas about German dance, from boastful rhetoric to personal artistic statements. Laban’s obsequious introductory essay sets the tone, praising both Wagner and Hitler. Similarly, the essays by Dorothee Günther and the writers Hans Brandenburg and Fritz Böhme were also supportive of the festival’s Nazi propaganda. However, the essays by the dancers Palucca, Georgi and Kreutzberg lacked any overt ideological material. GERMAN DANCE What did the organisers of the Tanzfestspiele consider ‘German Dance’ to be in year 1934? It appears to have been a loosely defined construct, based on pseudo-historical categories, old national stereotypes and a hodge-podge of terms designating ‘German’ in vague connection to dance. For example, the festival presented French court dances as ‘old German Renaissance dances’. Austrian ‘Deutsche’ and ‘Ländler’ of the late eighteenth century, along with nineteenth-century waltzes, were used as if they represented revered artefacts of an established German tradition and embodiments of some national essence. The same problematic lineage is found in the statements concerning the ‘New German Artistic Dance’, which was the central focus of the festival. It may seem ironic that the most significant precedent for the New German Artistic Dance’ was in fact ‘Ausdruckstanz’ of the

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Figure 2: ‘Dance with Cymbals.’ Courtesy of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Palucca-Archiv 4147. Photo: Otto Umbehr, copyright Phyllis Umbehr, Galerie Kicken, Berlin.

disdained Weimar Republic. Why did a movement that renounced the conventions and rules of classical dance willingly embrace the rule of the state? Susan Manning points out that ‘Ausdruckstanz’ and fascist ideology were both outgrowths of late romanticism; both valued strong emotion and intuition over intellect and rationality. Both were utopian and both thrived on the fear of an approaching apocalypse (Manning 1993: 172-3). National Socialists in turn were attracted to ‘Ausdruckstanz’ by the mass appeal it had engendered by the late 1920s, even reaching the working classes. The ‘New German Artistic Dance’ colonised other traditions as well: In the words of the 1934 programme: ‘dances that appear to be rooted in foreign folk rhythms from the multicoloured orient or other styles […] will always remain German art [when] performed by German dancers’. The theoretical rationale for ‘New German Artistic Dance’ was set forth for the public in the festival book and in newspaper articles.28 The dance critic Beda Prilipp applied the ‘Blood and Soil’ ideal to

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dance movement, which was born from the connection of a people to a particular geographic area.29 According to Prilipp, each nation has its own special movements dependent on the physical qualities of the area in which it lived. The power that gives rise to a dance, the rhythm of the movement, is connected to the soil and thus to the race. In his essay for the festival book, Fritz Böhme, the leading critic and theorist of dance in the Nazi era, described the relationship between ‘German [artistic] dance’ and ‘Volkstanz’ in greater detail. The German people create ‘Volkstanz’ naturally, and it is thus oriented to the society as a whole. Its intimate connection to nature imparts inner harmony to the people. The ‘art dance’ grows from the national awareness of the artistically developed dancer, who views himself as a ‘Wirkungsträger’ (bearer of influence), with a ‘völkische Verpflichtung’ (duty to the German people). His task is to use the ‘magical powers’ of his movement to express the inner impulses of the community and give it a voice, thereby transforming it into a national art form.30 Böhme’s more explicitly racial rationale is presented in a letter to Goebbels, dated 8 September 1933.31 Here the critic claims that dance is a question of race; he condemns the wild, confused and rampant growth of dance in the Weimar Republic, and asserts that healthy individuals will view the serious dancing of ‘Neger und Juden’ as a grotesque and comic racial antipode. He goes on to blame critics for the degenerate state of dance in Germany, because they are, ‘for the most part, Jews’. The rationale for ‘New German Artistic Dance’ is, like much of the ideology of the NSDAP, a concoction. Yet it held sway over a substantial part of the artistic strata in Germany. Perhaps we can understand some its appeal when we look at the evidence of the performances that were meant to exemplify and embody its ideals. THE CONTENT OF SELECTED PIECES: AUDIENCE AND CRITICAL RECEPTION Overview Table 1 shows an overview of the content of the Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934. Even a cursory review of this content reveals the high degree of international interest.32 Spanish themes are common, and the dances included Slavic, Iberian and Italian subjects. Of the performances on the first day, slightly fewer than half were on subjects that were not ‘German’, using music by the composers

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Joaquin Turina, Isaac Albeniz, Enrique Granados and Ottorini Respighi. The second day presented new dances with subject material and music that was almost entirely German in subject and musical accompaniment. Two-thirds of the material in the ‘Querschnitt’ programme on Thursday night were also German in this sense. The Friday performance offered a blend of material, with music by one German (Robert Schumann) and one Italian composer (Alfredo Casella); both of these segments, roughly two-thirds of the programme, were devoted to Italian subjects or music. The first third of the programme, performed by the ‘Festival Group of Young Dancers’, was devoted to German material. Sixteen of the twenty-four numbers performed by dancers from the ‘younger generation’ on the first Sunday programme were overtly German. The rest of the programme appears to have been international in subject and music. The final performance of the children’s ballets at the Staatsoper involved ‘German’ music and subject matter. Thus, while Germans created the new dances, the subject matter was often international, and many reviews gave the international dances prominent coverage.33 The critical reception and festival literature emphasised the Germanness of composers such as Bach, Mozart, Johann Strauss and Schumann. But what of the French style that Bach used in his Partita? What made Mozart’s elegant ballroom Deutsche for the Habsburg court German? How did Brahms’s romantic ‘German’ dances reflect national traits? Why didn’t Strauss’s Jewish lineage disqualify his waltzes from pure Germanness? The ‘old German Renaissance Dances’ listed in the programme are not even German: the pavane, bassedance and branle were court dances that flourished in French aristocratic circles before the aristocracy and mercantile classes imitated them in German lands. These problematic issues were apparently ignored in view of the more pressing need to present a retrospective of German dance in history, even if that meant distorting history. * The reviews of the Tanzfestspiele made note of the two main solo dancers of the event, Kreutzberg and Palucca, who were given a prominent place in the programme on the first day. This Sunday matinee programme was repeated three days later in its entirety and

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then excerpted four days later for the ‘Querschnitt’ programme. Each soloist presented dances that were mostly from their earlier repertory, following two ensemble pieces by Yvonne Georgi’s Hannover Theatre group (Georgi danced the most prominent solos in both pieces). Thus the festival started on a high note, presenting the three leading performers.34 In contrast to the first day’s emphasis on solo dance, the performance on the following Tuesday evening presented group dances choreographed by Dorothee Günther and Mary Wigman. This was also one of the performances to be repeated as a whole on the following Saturday night, and excerpted on 13 December. ‘New German Dance’, at its most ideological, dominated this evening. Thursday, 13 December, presented the Querschnitt or ‘CrossSection Programme of the Festival’, a kind of review of the entire event, divided into twelve segments. The popular duo of Alexander von Swaine and Alice Uhlen (he regularly danced at the Staatsoper, Berlin, and she at the Stadtthteater Breslau) made their first appearance, as did Valerie Kratina’s ensemble of the Badisches Landestheater in Karlsruhe. This was also the first of two presentations of choreography by Laban. The evening was advertised as a ‘Festabend zu Gunsten des Deutschen Winterhilfswerks 1934 and 1935’, that is to say, an evening whose proceeds were to go to a new RMVP charity devoted to helping the poor and unemployed. Reichsminister Goebbels attended this performance (Böhme 1934: 11). The Friday evening performance began with a ‘Festival Group of Young Dancers’, now performing pieces ‘inspired by folk dances’. This segment preceded the two main presentations: Die ungeratene Tochter, after the ballet music to Scarlattiana by Alfredo Casella, performed by Valerie Kratina’s ensemble, and Die alte Komödie (based on Robert Schumann’s cycle of piano pieces, Carnival), choreographed by Jens Keith and performed by the ensemble of the Essen City Theatres. The final day, Sunday, offered two performances. The first, an early matinee divided into three segments, was devoted to dancers of the younger generation who performed a variety of solos, duos and ensemble pieces. The venue then changed for the afternoon performance to the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, which gave the premiere of the two 1934 Christmas ballets. Laban choreographed the

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first ballet, Dornröschen (with music by Johann Strauss), while the second, Puppenfee (music by Josef Bayer), was choreographed by Lizzie Maudrik, ballet mistress at the Staatsoper. The afternoon was dedicated to German children, imparting a kind of thematic cycle to the form of the event as a whole. Starting with the leading soloists of the present generation, the event progressively shifted its emphasis to the younger generation of dancers and finally to children. The reviews of the event establish that it was perceived as a great success. Reviewers for the Dresdener Neueste Nachrichten (13 December, op. cit.) and the Dresdener Nachrichten (10 December, op. cit.) noted that the house was filled on the first day, and that the audience consisted of the highest authorities and NSDAP party officials, dancers from throughout Germany, the international press and an ‘audience of dance connoisseurs’ (fachverständiges Publikum). VIRTUOSITY AND SOLOISTS Critics saved their highest praise for Harald Kreutzberg, the uniquely charismatic male virtuoso among the mostly female star dancers of the event and an international star of immense appeal.35 Their words remind one of the Führer cult, as they credit him with almost superhuman communicative powers. Reviewers noted that audiences frequently interrupted his performances with ecstatic applause.36 But the actual range of critical reactions to his performances indicates the complexity of the issues surrounding artistic dance in Germany at the end of 1934, and interpreting Kreutzberg’s dances is not a simple matter. Kreutzberg, a homosexual, had long used androgynous personae in his performances. His personal life remained hidden from the public and, given the official attitude of the NSDAP toward homosexuals, he almost certainly had protection in high places. Virtuosity was problematic for the cultural rulers of the ‘New Germany’, who associated excessive musical virtuosity with ‘Das Judentum’. Just one year before the festival Fritz Böhme criticised ‘a certain coldness and too great distance’ in Kreutzberg’s studied virtuosity and formal emphasis; the dancer failed to express the ‘imponderables of life’ and was unable create a pulsating, living experience.37 One critic of the festival, almost issuing a warning to Kreutzberg, viewed the dancer’s virtuosity as a dangerous development, deriving from experience as a performer and teacher in the United States.38

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But many more critics admired Kreutzberg’s virtuosity. A reviewer from Dresden wrote that the dancer’s performances in the Tanzfestspiele gave ‘free rein to the inner life in rhapsodic form, expressionism […]’39 In addition to this overt reference to the artistic movement that the RMVP considered so ‘degenerate’, the same critic characterised Kreutzberg’s Königstanz as ‘turning inside-out the soul of the megalomaniac’ (‘das nach außen gekehrte Seelenbild des “Cäsaren=Wahns'”’40). This seems to be hardly a dance in praise of those who would create and rule over an empire, such as Hitler. Moreover, his Tanz des Hofnarren (Dance of the Court Fool)41 was also commended for depicting the jester’s anxiety and horror as he alone recognizes Death, who comes to claim the bride and bridegroom at a royal marriage ceremony. The critic K. G. Grabe gave a vivid, even touching description of this dance: ‘A wise, knowing, feeling fool. He wants to be a man, he must be a fool. He staggers in torment through the prison of his Fool’s identity’42 These striking performances, as detailed by the last two critics, seem today to be strangely prescient of the dilemma for the artist in the Third Reich.43 None of Kreutzberg’s dances for the Tanzfestspiele were created for the festival; they all came from the period of the Weimar Republic. With the exception of one dance (Spiel, to music by Enrique Granados), this also seems to be the case for the performance of Gret Palucca at the festival, although she appears to have made significant changes in her approach to movement. Like Kreutzberg, Palucca also received a small number of negative reviews. One pro-German Berlin critic panned Palucca’s dancing in her ‘trance-like state’ as too ‘individualistic and egocentric’ to represent the entire ‘Volk’, while Kreutzberg’s dances were characterised as ‘masterful realizations’ of the ‘Gestaltung des Großen und Ganzen’ (Great and the All).44 Moreover, this same critic praised Kreutzberg for his ‘responsibility’ to the ‘Volk’, in contrast to Palucca. Another critic faulted Palucca purely on aesthetic grounds: her movements were too much of the same thing, and her expression lacked vision and content.45 Many more critics were positive than negative, however, praising Palucca’s ‘maiden-like charm’,46 ‘light, gliding movement’,47 ‘je ne sai quoi’,48 and ‘musical lyricism’,49 with ‘tender movements that caress, capture and embrace the space’.50 These remarks support Katja Erdmann-Rajski’s observation that Palucca had transformed her style in the early 1930s, reducing her

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heavy, abrupt and angular movements in favour of more soft, gracious and playful motion that better accommodated the National Socialist’s notion of femininity (Erdmann-Rajski 2000: 249). THE ENSEMBLES: GEORGI, WIGMAN AND GÜNTHER Of the three leading German dance ensembles, Yvonne Georgi’s appears to have been the least ideological. Her dances for the festival seem to have been somewhat uneven in quality, if we are to believe the critical response. While her Partita 2, based on music by J. S. Bach, was rudely dismissed,51 Erinnerung was widely praised, if only for its narrative theatricality and less for its choreography. Some critics described it as a ‘dance-pantomime’ or ‘dance-play’, while others found it marionnette-like. Known chiefly for her ability in pantomime dance, ideology seems less prominent in the critical reaction to her pieces than to some others. Perhaps one can find something more ‘German’ in the dances that appear to have been constructed to embody Nazi propaganda and ideology, or at least modified to fit the National Socialist world view. In her analysis of Wigman’s Frauentänze Susan Manning suggests that the dancers have become less individualised than in Wigman’s Weimar period. Manning also perceives a changed relationship between leader and group, one that is more formalised and formulaic. The relationship has become static: charismatic leader and anonymous follower. Women’s roles were also more static and circumscribed than in the Weimar years, conforming to their separate spheres as defined by Nazi ideology (Manning 1993: 184-5).52 In a different way than Wigman’s pieces, Dorothee Günther’s Klänge und Gesichte seems consistent with the spirit of German fascism. Günther’s ensemble is from Munich, the birthplace of National Socialism.53 Her essay in the programme book is supportive of NSDAP ideology. The title of her dance performance, ‘Sounds and Visions’, suggests basic sensory experiences and impulses, as do the subtitles of the three constituent parts, The Cheerful Dances, the Dark Dances and the Bright Dances. The festival programme provides an almost mystical description of the work: The Cheerful Dances are the Maiden Dances, constructed as round dances and accompanied by cymbals, flutes and bells. The Dark Dances symbolise both the dark side of life and the struggle between the All and the One. The power of the One smashes to pieces the rebellion of Masses. The Bright Dances

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David J. Buch & Hana Worthen depict the tension-releasing conclusion in which all dancers are united in one free community. The music is part of the dance itself, and is performed by the dancers on ‘old German instruments’.54

According to this description, it requires no stretch of the imagination to see the One as the Führer principle and the mass rebellion as Bolshevism, though of course this must remain conjectural. The choice of the word ‘Kampf’ and the triumph of the One over the dark forces of the Many (All) suggest the subtext of the Führer cult. The critical reaction to Günther’s dances was relatively scant, lacking both the enthusiastic praise given to Kreutzberg and the criticism levelled at Palucca. Leonie Dotzler, apparently one of the few critics to discuss Günther’s contribution in any detail, noted that the choreography was clean and clear, but not especially rich in ideas.55 Dotzler also wrote that the group was better suited to maidenly charm and ‘joie de vivre’ than to the ‘dunkle Problematik’ (dark side). The surviving photographic evidence includes striking images of Tanz mit Cymbeln (see Figure 2) and Flötentanz from the Cheerful Dance group, which seem cultic, like a scene of pagan worship. ‘Dream Dance’, from the ‘Bright’ group, is particularly striking in its cultic, ritual-like appearance; it was accompanied by voices without instruments.56 Rather than the inner expression and distorted imagery of Ausdruckstanz, the images here seem harmonic and posed, as if borrowed from figures on an antique pagan vase. Dotzler’s review describes the visual effect of the two levels on the stage, that of the instrumental group on the middle level and the dancers above them, as resembling a ‘frieze on an old temple and tomb’. On the other hand, the image of Günther’s ‘Dark Dance’ seems a return to expressionism. Did Günther intend the opposition so that the more orderly ‘New German Dance’ could appear to triumph over its expressionistic past, just as the ‘One’ triumphs over the ‘Masses’? Whatever Günther’s intent, the critics found the works from the Weimar Republic, particularly the pieces by Kreutzberg and Palucca, to be more interesting and substantial than the new dances. The contrived ‘New German Dances’ engendered simple description and background material on the careers of the personalities rather than criticism of the dances themselves.

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THE YOUNGER GENERATION Several segments on the festival programme featured the ‘Festival Group of Young Dancers’, introducing the public to the ‘aspiring talents’ of the next generation who would show the ‘path that the young have taken to the new German artistic dance’. In fact, the festival seems to progress, indeed to build up, to these performances as a kind of climax. Several of the numbers on these programmes seem contrived to fit the new RMVP ideology for dance. The segment on 14 December offered performances ‘inspired by folk dances’. A greater level of detail is available for the programme performed on 16 December and some of the titles suggest that these dances were ideologically inspired. For example, the Suite based on ‘Volksmusik’, performed by the duo Grimm and Arja, the Tanz am Morgen and Kampflied, performed by Ruth Boin, and the Kleine Suite nach alten deutschen Volksliedern performed by Gisela Sonntag (of the Wigman ensemble).57 The surviving archival sources contain very little material on the dances presented by the ‘younger generation’. Moreover, the critics seem to have paid little attention to these numbers in their reviews. One reviewer, however, archly panned the younger dancers with an allusion to their Aryan beauty: ‘It makes no sense to present cabaret numbers performed by well-developed blondes, numbers that only gain the semblance of significance through reference to the title.’58 CONCLUSIONS In his report on the festival, addressed to Goebbels and dated 13 March 1935, Laban asserted that the event achieved all of the goals that the sponsors had set forth: to bring attention to the originality and worth of German artistic dance and to prove its cultural significance (the document is transcribed in Karina & Kant 1996: 238). In support of his claims, Laban included a selection of press clippings. Additionally, Laban made a case for more financial support in the future and for a greater role for dance in German cultural life. But Laban’s conclusions were already contested. A report entitled ‘Tänzerische Tagesfragen’ appeared in the journal Der Tanz 8/1 (January 1935),59 criticizing the festival for insufficiently drawing the distinction between what was really ‘new’ and what was really ‘German’. The report went on to deliver an ominous critique of the

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festival’s overemphasis on the ‘typical post-war phenomena of the expressionistic period’ (in den Nachkriegsjahren typische Erscheinungen der expressionistischen Zeit), also supported by reviews from prominent newspapers such as the notorious Völkischer Beobachter. Despite its rhetoric and implications of a dark future for creative dance in the Third Reich, there was a grain of truth in this critique. The overall structure of the event itself lacked any real unity. Rather it was a potpourri of modern dance, borrowing freely from popular and classical styles, Ausdruckstanz and other sources, many with no real connection to the Germanness promoted by the RMVP. The putative unity was merely in the rhetoric of the propaganda and the unabashed assertion of German superiority. Like the National Socialist state, the festival appears to have been a mixture of both talent and mediocrity, serving opportunistic aims. Some dances appear to have been consistent with the ideology of the NSDAP and its concoction of myth, cant and popular appeal. These reflect varying degrees of compromise by artists with the desires of the fascist sponsors.60 On the one hand, prominent individuals such as Laban, Wigman and Günther signed their names to published articles that extolled the virtues of the ‘New German Artistic Dance’ and its NSDAP ideology. Wigman and Günther apparently produced choreography that served that ideology as well. On the other hand, the virtuosos Kreutzberg and Palucca mostly performed their earlier dances (although Palucca had recently transformed her style), bringing, so to speak, a Weimar dance aesthetic into the hostile arena of the National Socialistic Festival. Their compromise is, then, perhaps more ambiguous, extending only to their participation in RMVP events. Nonetheless, they benefited from the Ministry’s largesse at the same time that less fortunate colleagues were either emigrating or facing a worse fate. This fact has tainted their legacy. The dire economic situation of contemporary Germany induced dancers such as Wigman to form new groups and find sponsorship from the Propaganda Ministry. Of course, this explanation cannot fully justify their collaboration. But compromise does not mean a complete surrender of their artistic heritage. Along with the contrived ‘German Dances’ of Günther and some of the younger dancers, Laban, Palucca, Georgi and Kreutzberg gave prominence to international traditions and to ‘Ausdruckstanz’. These dancers may

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have compromised their art, but they did not abandon its international scope or its roots. Perhaps this fact contributed to Laban, Wigman and Palucca eventual falling out with the Nazi State. Like so much of Nazi propaganda, the festival literature claimed to look toward a brilliant future while honouring national traditions of the past. Yet in order to reconcile history with ideology, the past needed to be reconstructed. Thus, while the festival was a clear success with the public, the ideological goals of its sponsor ultimately failed. Instead of praising the future-oriented ‘New German Artistic Dance’ and the ‘aspiring talents’ of the younger generation, most of the audience and critics in fact celebrated the accomplishments of the creators of ‘Ausdruckstanz’ from the Weimar Republic, that disdained period of ‘wild, confused and rampant growth in dance’. Table 1: Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 Sunday, 9 Dec. 11:30 AM 1. Partita 2 (music: J. S. Bach), Städtische Bühnen Hannover, Yvonne Georgi [soloist, 4 girls, 8 women, 4 men]. Pianist: Erwin Große. A ‘free composition that follows the principles (polyphony) of music.’ 2. Erinnerung (music: Joaquin Turina), Städtische Bühnen Hannover. Soloists: Georgi as Senorita Maria, Eduard Böttger as drunken police officer and Herbert Freund as the Don. Pianist: Erwin Große. ‘A Spanish scene in pantomime.’ 3. Four Dances, Harald Kreutzberg. Pianist: Friedrich Wilckens. Tanz des Hofnarren (from the ballet Don Morte; music: Friedrich Wilckens) [1926] Königstanz (music: Max Reger) Spanisches Straßenlied (music after Isaac Albeniz). Also called Sequidillas or spanische Phantasie. Drei ungarische Tänze (music after Brahms) 4. Five dances, Gret Palucca. Pianist: Victor Schwinghammer. Spiel (music: Enrique Granados) [1934] Elegie (music: Ottorini Respighi) [1933] Mit Schwung (music: Volksmusik) [1925] Serenata (music: I. Albeniz) [1931] Rosenkavalierwalzer (music: Richard Strauss) [1st setting: 1927; 2nd setting: 1933] Tuesday, 11 Dec. 8:15 PM 1. Klänge und Gesichte (music: Gunild Keetman), Dance group Günther-München. Tanzgestaltung: Maja Lex; staging and costumes by Dorothee Günther, 6 Tableaus [‘Bilder’] in three parts for solo (Maja Lex) and ensemble. Music performed in part by the dancers themselves ‘primarily on old German instruments’.

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Die heiteren Tänze [Tanz mit Cymbeln, Flötentanz, Tanz mit Schellen]. Die düsteren Tänze [‘Der Nachtmahr’]. Die hellen Tänze [Traumtanz, Schwingender Reigen]. Dance and music: Maja Lex, Margot Berger, Erika Bulle, Rosa Daiber, Anni Fries, Judith Gobrecht, Maja Mollison, Sieglinde Müller-Elmau, Ruth Opitz, Gisela Scheidt. Music: Lilo Diem, Traute Klein, Gisela Reiners, Marianne Simon. Spinet: Hans Bergese, Portative: Dr Twittenhoff. 2. Frauentänze (music: Hanns Hasting, for piano, flute, and percussion), Mary Wigman’s dance group. Evokes all five life-spheres of women’s experience and symbolizes her powers: girlish mirth, motherhood, female capacity for suffering and grief, prophecy, the abyss. Hochzeitlicher Reigen [duo and ensemble] Mütterlicher Tanz [solo] Totenklage [solo and group dance (12 dancers)] Tanz der Seherin [solo and ensemble] Hexentanz [duo and ensemble] Dancers: Mary Wigman, Gina Blauschek, Ruih Boin, Ursel Brulez, Gretl Curth, Margit Dudel, Thilde Gorbach, Annemarie Grashey, Erika Klütz, Lysa Köhler, Inge Kroeker, Jutta Lucchesi, Drucilla Schroeder, Gisela Sonntag, Erika Triebsch, Inge Wißmach. Pianist: Hanns Hasting. Costumes: Elis Griebel. Wednesday, 12 Dec. 8:15 PM (same programme as 9 Dec.) Thursday, 13 Dec. 8:15 PM Festival Evening in Support of the German Winter Aid Fund 1934 and 1935. CrossSection of the German Dance Festival 1934. Festabend zu Gunsten des Deutschen Winterhilfswerks 1934 und 1935. Querschnitt durch die Deutschen Tanzfestspiele 1934. 1. Dorothee Günther: Die heiteren Tänze 2. Gret Palucca: Mit Schwung 3. Palucca: Walzer 4. Harald Kreutzberg: Königstanz 5. Kreutzberg: Spanisches Straßenlied 6. Mary Wigman: Totenklage 7. Wigman: Hochzeitlicher Reigen Intermission 8. Yvonne Georgi: Erinnerung 9. Traumtanz aus ‘Die Rekrutierung’ (music: Mozart). Soloists: Alexander von Swaine (Staatsoper Berlin) and Alice Uhlen, (Stadttheater Breslau). 10. Caprichos (after the images of Goya, music: Wladimir Metzl). A. von Swaine and A. Uhlen. 11. Deutsche Tänze (music: Brahms), Valeria Kratina, Dance group of Badisches Landestheater, Karlsruhe. 12. Polovetzer Tänze aus der Oper ‘Fürst Igor’ (music: Borodin). Choreography: Laban, Dance group of Staatstheater, Berlin.

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Friday, 14 Dec. 8:15 PM61 1. Ländler (music: von Beethoven). Soloist: Erika Lindner, Staatsoper Berlin. Pianist: H. Blume 2. Tanzen und tanzen lassen (music: Volksmusik). Soloist: E. Simons-Makarowa, Köln. Pianist: Hans Eppink. 3. Allemande (music: J. S. Bach). Soloists: Gisela Jeimke-Heinz Schwarze, Städtische Bühnen Hannover. Pianist: Erwin Grosse. 4. Coppelius from the ballet ‘Coppelia’ (music: Délibes). Soloist: Herbert Freund, Städtische Bühnen Hannover. 5. Wiegenlied (music: Genia Socoleano). Soloist: Erika Lindner, Staatsoper Berlin. Pianist: H. Blume. 6. Slawischer Tanz (music: Brahms). Soloists: Gisela Jeimke-Heinz Schwarze, Städtische Bühnen Hannover. Pianist: Erwin Grosse. 7. Die ungeratene Tochter (after the ballet music to ‘Scarlattiana’ by Alfredo Casella). Dance comedy by Valeria Kratina. Conductor: Karl Köhler, Staatsoper Berlin. Piano soloist: Walter Born. Costumes: Marg. Schellenberg; stage design: Heinz Gerhard Zircher. Dance group of Badisches Staatstheater, Karlsruhe. Dancers: Toni Widmann (Die Mama); Margot Hermes (Die ungeratene Tochter); Irmgard Katz, Hildegard Edel, Lola Dahlinger (Die braven Töchter); Clara Supper (Die alte Tante); Emil Michutta (Der Onkel Doktor); Irmgard Silberborth (Der reiche Freier); Robert Mayer (Der andere Freier); Irmgard Silberborth, Aenne Frohmann, Anna Mehle, Helene Rieker (Seine Freunde), Julianne Gutter, Lia Fischer (Zofen); Liesel Holl, Paula Siebert (Diener). Intermission 8. Aus den Heide- und Kinderliedern (music: Hans Lührs). Soloist: Golli Caspar, Staatsoper Berlin. Pianist: H. Keßner. 9. Allegro brillante (music: Granados). Soloist: Almut Winckelmann, Staatstheater Hamburg. Pianist: Günther Hertel. 10. Tanz in den Morgen (music: W. A. Mozart), Soloist: Erika Lindner, Staatsoper Berlin. Pianist: H. Blume. 11. Swer si schiltet, derst betrogen (music: Grazioli), Soloist: E. Simons-Makarowa, Köln. Pianist: Hans Eppink. 12. Nebel und Sonne (music: Keßler—H. Blume). Conductor: K. Köhler, Staatsoper Berlin. Rehearsing: Gertrud Wienecke, costumes: Franz Löwitsch. Dances of pucks, witches, gnomes and other creatures of the landscape. Dancers: Jonny Ahemm, Sigrid Caune, Anne von Hanffstengel, Maria Kindscher, Irmgard Klahre, Friede Lohmann, Oda Schottmüller. 13. Ländlicher Tanz (music: Kreuz n. Auber). Conductor: K. Köhler, Staatsoper Berlin. Rehearsing: Wilmo Kamrath, costumes: Verch. Dancers: Eva Allerding, Käte Belling, Gerda Kretzschmar, Ellinor Warsitz, Veith Büchel, Willi Haumann, Wilmo Kamrath, Werner Schindler, Otto Ulbricht. Intermission 14. Altes Tanzlied (ancient music, composer unknown, c. 1579). Soloist: Frida Holst, Stadttheater Münster. Pianist: Hans Müller-Kray. 15. Puck (music: H. Purcell). Soloist: Karl Bergeest, Teatro Comunale, Florenz. Pianist: Hans Müller-Kray, Stadttheater Münster.

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16. Walzer (music: Chopin). Soloist: Frida Holst, Stadttheater Münster. Pianist: Hans Müller-Kray, Stadttheater Münster. 17. Derwisch (music: van Beethoven). Soloist: Alexander von Swaine. Pianist: S. v. Sachnowsky. 18. Maler im 3/4-Takt, Walzerparodie (music: Cremieux). Soloist: Karl Bergeest, Teatro Comunale, Florenz. Pianist: Hans Müller-Kray. 19. Spanischer Bauerntanz: Castanetten (Volksmusik). Soloists: von Swaine, Staatsoper Berlin – Alice Uhlen, Stadttheater Breslau. Pianist: S. v. Sachnowsky. 20. Die alte Komödie (music after Carnival von Rob. Schumann, orchestrated by Otto Singer). Conductor: Cornelius Monske, Städtische Bühnen Essen. Choreography Jens Keith. Stage design and costume: Paul Sträter. Dancers: Walter Wurg (Harlekin); Hans Gansert (Sein Diener); Annemarie Herrmann (Colombine); Kurt Lenz (Pierrot); Lulla v. Sachnowsky [in handwritten notice: Assia Korsowa] (Pierrette); Jens Keith (Clown); Ursula Deinert (Pimpinella); Peter Roleff, Harald Kühnlein (Rüpel). Masks: Trude Pohl, Thea Obenaus, Bella Vernici, Rosemarie Havenstein; Enlarged with the Dance Studio of the Folkwang School, Essen. Saturday, 15 Dec. PM (same as 11 Dec.) Sunday, 16 Dec. 11:30 AM Festspielgruppe junger Tänzer [Small and large ensembles]. 1. Nocturne from the ballet, ‘Le triomphe de l’amour’ (music: Lully), prepared by Marion Herrmann. Danced by Marion Herrmann, Liselore Bergmann, Friedel Mimschowsky, Walter Ciessow. Pianist: Hanna Hartmann, Berlin. 2. Gavotte (music: Martini). Soloist: Nana Kohrs. Pianist: Hans Bergese, Berlin. 3. Der Ballspieler (music: Cesar Bresgen). Soloist: Thilde Gorbach (Dresden). Pianist: Peter Cieslak, Dresden. 4. Suite: Verhalten; Bewegt; Betont (music: Volksmusik). Soloists: Elfrit Grimm and Aira Arja (Berlin). Pianist: Bruno Luck, Berlin. 5. Festlicher Marsch (music: R. Wagner). Soloist: Wilmo Kamrath (Berlin). Pianist: H. Kreuz (Berlin). 6. Alte deutsche Renaissancetänze [c. 1500]: Pavane, Basse-Tanz, Branles (‘faithful to the original’). Hertha Feist Ensemble, prepared by H. Feist und Hilde von Gauerstaedt. Music played by the Spieleinung Berlin, Margarete Riedel, Hans Krüger, directors. Intermission 7. Lebenslied (music: Tschaikowski). Soloist: Friede Lohmann (Berlin). Pianist: Walter Schönberg, Berlin. 8. Scherzo (music by R. Schumann). Dance group of Palucca; prepared by Marianne Vogelsang. Pianist: Adolf Havlik, Dresden. 9. Tanz am Morgen (music: Rolf Stehr). Soloist: Ruih Boin (Dresden). Pianist: Peter Cieslak, Dresden. 10. Largo (music: J.S. Bach), prepared by Marion Herrmann, Berlin (4 dancers). Pianist: Hanna Hartmann. 11. Cappriccioso (music: W[alter]. Schönberg). Soloist: Friede Lohmann (Berlin). Pianist: W. Schönberg, Berlin.

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12. Kampflied (music: percussion trio), prepared by Ruih Boin. Dancers: R. Boin, Gretl Curth, Drucilla Schroeder (all from Dresden). Intermission 13. Frage (Baskische Melodie arrang. by Prof. Ludwig Heß, Berlin). Soloist: Afrika Doering. Pianist: S. v. Sachnowsky (all from Berlin). 14. Schreittanz (music: d’Anglebert). Soloists: Gretl Curth, Drucilla Schroeder. Pianist: H. Hasting (all from Dresden). 15. Tänze, aus den Tänzen des armen Lebens (music: R. Schumann). Soloist: Heide Woog (Mülheim). Pianist: Hanna Hartmann. 16. Hymnus (music: Scott). Dancers: Eva Glaser, Herta Fischer, Charlotte Hölzner, Marianne Vogelsang (Dance group of Palucca), prepared by Marianne Vogelsang. Pianist: Adolf Havlik. 17. Deutsche Tänze (music: Mozart). Soloist: Afrika Doering. Pianist: S. v. Sachnowsky. 18. Kleine Suite, [Reigen; Abendlied; Ländlicher Tanz]. Dancers: Ruih Boin, Ursel Brulez, Margitt Dudel, Annemarie Grashey, Erika Klütz, Gisela Sonntag. Pianist: H. Hasting (all from Dresden). Sunday, 16 Dec. 3:00 PM Staatsoper Unter den Linden: Premiere of the two 1934 Christmas ballets: Dornröschen, choreographed by Rudolf von Laban, (music: Johann Strauss). Conductor: Leo Spies, stage design: Benno von Arent. Dancers: Richard Larkens (König); Regina Gallo (Die Königin); Rita Zabekow (Dornröschen); Golly Kaspar (Die gute Fee); Liselotte Köster (Die böse Fee); Benno Kaminski (Prinz); Robert Robst (Haushofmeister); Ursel Peters (Froschkönig); Carl Hildebrand (Koch); Detlev Biel (Alter Turmwart); Melanie Lucia (Amme); Manon Ehrfuhr, Ilse Meudtner (Hofdamen); Alexander von Swaine (Oberjäger); Peter Reinsch (Jäger); Kurt Krüger (Prinz Eitel); Rolf Jahnke (Prinz Frech); Richard Schöffmann (Prinz Dumm); Erwin Hansen (Prinz Feige); Wilhelm Altvater (Prinz Faul); Edith Moser, Gerda Steizig, Erika Klein (Hexenfalter); Hildegart Grabert, Friedel Knirlberger, Liselotte Michaelis (Fledermäuse); Ursula Busse, Eva Drost, Gerda Karen, Elfriede Kantner, Melanie Suiver, Edith Türckheim (Mägde); Erna Lommes (Hühnermagd); Jolanda Reinhardt, Kätelore Schenk, Friedel Romanowski, Herta Korinek, Erika Lindner, Erna Lemcke (Küchenjungen), Erna Sander, Annemarie Brandt, Lotte Krammerer, Erna Steindamm, Ella Behrendt, Christiane Richter (Feen). Puppenfee, choreographed by Lizzie Maudrik, (music: Josef Bayer). The afternoon was dedicated to German children.

NOTES 1

All translations are made by the authors. We wish to thank Frank-Manuel Peter for his help in locating the programme materials and his commentary on a late draft of this article, and William B. Worthen for valuable advice and illuminating conversations. We would also like to thank Stephan Dörschel of the Archiv Darstellende Kunst of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, for his invaluable assistance

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in tracking down photographic permissions. Due to the complexity of citing archival materials, all references to archival sources are fully documented in endnotes, and do not appear in the list of Works Cited. 2 On the RMVP and its cultural divisions, see Steinweiss (1993) and Rischbieter (2000). 3 ‘Ein Anzahl aufstrebender Begabungen zeigt den Weg der Jugend zum neuen deutschen künstlerischen Tanz.’ The programme of the Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 is preserved in the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin [henceforth SAdK], Wigman-Archiv 51. 4 For details on these dance congresses, see Müller and Stöckemann (1993). 5 Horst-Wessel Platz was previously called Bülow-Platz. Today this square is named Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. As the result of divisions in the labour movement, Erwin Piscator ended his post as Oberspielleiter of the Volksbühne in 1927, after a conflict with the Social Democratic members of the Verreinvorstand (the board). For more on the Volksbühne see Kiehn (1994) and Davies (2000). 6 The film is mentioned by Karina & Kant (1996: 148), but the authors do not provide a citation. 7 ‘Deutsche Tanz-Jugend’, Münchner Illustrierte Presse 11/48 (29 November 1934), pp. 1542-43; “‘eutscher Tanz’, Die Woche [Berlin] 48 (1 December 1934); Beda Prilipp, ‘Der künstlerische Tanz in Deutschland als Ausdruck neuen Lebensgefühls’, Deutschland Berlin, 2. Feb. 1935, pp. 15- 18; Leonie Dotzler, ‘Die Deutschen Tanzfestspiele 1934 / Großer Erfolg Mary Wigmans’, Dresdener Neueste Nachrichten 289 (13 December 1934), article dated 12 December (Berlin). These are preserved as press clippings in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942 and 4090. 8 O.W., ‘Auftakt der Deutschen Tanzfestspiele’, Neue Leipziger Zeitung, 11 December 1934: ‘die erste große repräsentative Tanzveranstaltung des neuen Deutschland […]’ in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942. Several critics wrote that the festival brought an end to the long struggles and chaos of dance in earlier years by imposing order. One critic [ ‘Deutsche Tanzfestspiele in Berlin. Eröffnung im Theater am Horst-Wessel Platz’, Dresdener Nachrichten 578 (10 December 1934, in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942)] tied the chaotic state of dance in the Weimar Republic to the contentious political and social divisions of the time. 9 The goals of the festival were presented in an article by Rudolf von Laban, ‘Die neue Tanzkunst in Deutschland: Zu den “Deutschen Tanzfestspielen 1934”’ in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung 565 (4 December 1934, in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942). Here Laban wrote that the previous dance congresses were haphazard and aimless presentations of various tendencies and movements in modern dance. In contrast, Laban promised that the Tanzfestpiele 1934 would offer a ‘carefully ordered programme’. 10 On the nomenclature of ‘Ausdruckstanz’, see Dahms (2001: 152). Servos gives the essential elements of Ausdruckstanz as ‘emotional intensity, strength of expression, visible tension, and a concentration on the essential’ (1998: 204). 11 The Finnish dancer and Wigman student, Aira Arja, was listed as a resident of Berlin. 12 ‘Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 im Theater am Horst-Wessel-Platz in Berlin’, Deutsche Bühnenkorrespondenz München 99 (15 December 1934), in SAdK, PaluccaArchiv 3942.

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This was discovered in 1936, when Palucca was declared ‘Halbjüdin’ but given a special dispensation by the Propaganda Ministry to perform (with limitations). However, she had to close her school for modern dance in Dresden in 1939. After 1945 Palucca reopened her school and was teaching until her death in 1993. Despite her ambivalent position in the Third Reich, Palucca was celebrated in the DDR as the victim of the National Socialism. For details, see Erdmann-Rajski (2000). 14 ‘Der deutsche Kunsttanz [...] stirbt, wenn nicht jetzt in letzter Minute das Propagandaministerium eingreift’. This statement by Otto von Keudell is taken from a typescript copy of a document addressed to Goebbels, where Keudell outlines a series of proposals concerning the use of dance in the Third Reich. The document is preserved in the Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfeld [henceforth BA], shelfmark R55/ 20237, Bl. 207-8. 15 BA, shelfmark R55/ 20237, Bl. 212. This is a copy of an inter-office communication from Keudell dated 13 July 1934. 16 BA, shelfmark R55/ 20237, Bl. 207. The opening text of his ecstatic presentation reads as follows: ‘Es gibt in Deutschland etwa seit 1900 einen aus deutschen Voraussetzungen entstandenen modernen künstlerischen Tanz (Begründer Laban), der als deutsche Kunsttanz alle europäischen und viele außereuropäischen Kulturstaaten (z.B. Amerika, Japan) eroberte. In diesem Tanz formt der schon von Nietzsche ersehnte, “bewegte und tänzerische deutsche Mensch” durch das Medium seines zum Instrument erzogenen Körpers aus der Tiefe des deutschen Gemüts- und Gefühlslebens Tanzkunstwerke (Einzel-, Gruppen- u. Chorleistungen) wie sie den erlesenen Kunstwerken anderer Kunstgebiete ebenbürtig zur Seite treten und bei der Fest- und Feiergestaltung, wie auch im Lebensrhythmus des dritten Reiches eine ganz besonders umfassende Aufgabe zu erfüllen haben.’! 17 Keudell believed that Laban would lend prestige and provide a nationalistic foundation for the event. Laban’s naïve politics were indeed sympathetic to those of the NSDAP. For details on Laban’s life and work, see Hodgson and Perston-Dunlop (1990), Perston-Dunlop (1998), and especially Dörr (1998). 18 BA, shelfmark R55/ 20237, Bl. 208: ‘Stellung einer großen Aufgabe für den deutschen künstlerischen Tanz.’ 19 Ibid., Bl. 213. 20 F.B. [Fritz Böhme] mentions Keudell’s argument as an important impetus for the festival in his article ‘Die deutsche Tanzkunst wirbt[.] “Deutsche Tanzspiele 1934” in Berlin – Gastspiele auch im Ausland’, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung 491 (20 October 1934), in Tanzarchiv Leipzig, shelfmark Rep. 019 III Nr 2. 21 Laban would also be in charge of the subsequent dance festivals in the years 1935 and 1936. Laban’s concept of the New German Dance apparently satisfied Goebbels until 1936, as evidenced by the praise of Laban in the Minister’s diary (‘Laban does his thing well’). Quoted in Fröhlich (1987: 506). 23 August 1935: ‘Nachm[ittag] Rangsdorf Tanzschule. Sehr unterhaltend. Laban macht seine Sache gut.’ In the spring of 1937, after falling out with the NSDAP authorities, Laban left Germany for Paris. 22 Letter from Laban to Palucca, dated 27 August 1934, in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 5266. 23 The letter is preserved in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 5269. 24 In a letter dated 15 November 1934 and addressed to Laban (SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 5269), Palucca expresses concern that one of her solo dances, ‘Mit Schwung’,

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apparently displeased Magda Goebbels, wife of the propaganda minister, at this jury. Since Keudell specifically requested this dance, Palucca was in a quandary. She asked Laban to contact Frau Goebbels to see if ‘Mit Schwung’ would be acceptable. Laban wrote back that Frau Goebbels had no objections and the dance was allowed. His letter is also found in Palucca-Archiv 5269. 25 ‘Der deutsche Tanz ist vielgestaltig in seinen Erscheinungsformen. In dieser Vielfalt lebt aber eine einheitliche Grundkraft, die unserem Wesen entspringt. Wenn wir auch Tänze zeigen, die in fremden Volksrhythmen der Buntheit des Orients oder anderen Stilen zu wurzeln scheinen, immer bleibt es deutsche Kunst von deutschen Tänzern dargestellt. Wir Deutschen gelten oft für derb und anmutlos, und doch hat deutsche Frische des Temperaments und Tiefe des Gemüts schon oft die Welt erobert, nicht nur in Musik und Dichtkunst, sondern auch in der Tanzkunst.’ 26 Kolbe (1877-1947) has often been labelled as a producer of ‘Nazi art’, but this is a gross oversimplification. The artist’s independence and distrust of the NSDAP made for a difficult relationship at times with the Nazi authorities. In this sense he was not unlike a number of other established German artists, composers and dancers who were courted by the cultural wing of the Third Reich. Kolbe studied in Munich, Paris and Rome, then joined the Berlin ‘Secession’ movement in 1905. He later adopted elements of expressionism and even cubism, becoming Germany’s most important and successful sculptor of the 1920s. He would reject expressionism in the 1930s and produce a number of large athletic nude males for the Nazi regime, somewhat like those of his younger colleague, Arno Breker. But Breker, and not Kolbe, would become the favoured sculptor of the Nazis. For details see Ursel Berger, ed., Georg Kolbe 1877-1947 (Munich, New York: Prestel, 1998). 27 Manning describes the statue as ‘Greek sculpture’ and so mischaracterizes its style as classical. Contemporary viewers probably would have recognized Kolbe's ‘Tänzerin’ and thought more of the nationalistic ‘German’ connotation of the famous statue than classical antiquity or ballet. 28 From 1933 through 1935 the propaganda ministry attempted to instigate a policy for training in dance, for example, Die geistigen Grundlagen für Körperbildung und Tanz im Nationalsozialismus issued by the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur und dem Reichsverband Deutscher Turn-, Sport- und Gymnastiklehrer im NS-Lehrerbund, Sonderdruck der Deutschen Kultur-Wacht, 1933. This document has been transcribed in Müller and Stöckemann (1993: 118-20). RMVP Directive 48, reprinted in Der Tanz 8 (1935), 4-10, established the ‘German Artistic Dance’ as a separate entity alongside ‘folk dance’ and ‘classical dance’. It also imposed restrictions on improvisation and provided a codified vocabulary of expression. 29 Prilipp, ‘Der künstlerische Tanz in Deutschland’, op. cit. 30 Fritz Böhme, ‘Deutscher Tanz und Volkstanz’, in Laban, ed., Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934, op. cit., pp. 37-43. 31 BA, shelfmark R55/ 20237, Bl. 178-9: ‘Tanz ist eine Rassenfrage; es gibt eine internationale, überrassische, tänzerische Form. Wo sie gepflegt wird, greift sie die Wurzel und den echten Ausdruck eines Volkes an. Es ist kein Zufall, dass die ernstgemeinte tänzerische Bewegung unserer rassischen Antipoden, der Neger und Juden, den Gesunden unter uns widerlich, grotesk-komisch vorkommt. […] Die

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Tanzkritik lag bisher zum grossen Teil in jüdischen Händen und wird auch heute noch z.T. von Juden ausgeübt.’ 32 Laban, ‘Die neue Tanzkunst in Deutschland’, op. cit., wrote that he favoured international music from a variety of time periods in order to provide a broad foundation for the ‘New Artistic Dance’. 33 A few critics faulted the festival for giving short shrift to German subject material and music. For example, a pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic reviewer ( ‘Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934’, op. cit.) complained about the foreign themes and styles of the dance and an excess of foreign music. L.M., ‘Beginn der Tanzfestspiele’, Deutsche Zeitung Berlin 99 (11 December 1934), in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942, criticised the choreographer-dancers Georgi and Kreutzberg for their preference for Spanish over German subjects. 34 Although Palucca had strategically positioned herself last on the programme (letter from Palucca to Laban, dated 10 November 1934, SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 5269), the critics consistently gave their highest praise to Kreutzberg. See below for more details on the critical reception of these dancers. 35 The documentary film, Tanz unter dem Hakenkreuz, directed by Annette von Wangenheim (Westdeutsche Rundfunk in 2003) includes filmed segments of Kreutzberg, Palucca and Wigman. For details on Kreutzberg’s life and work, see Peter (1997). Kreutzberg continued his career after the fall of the Third Reich until his death in 1968. 36 F.J.Kl. ‘Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934’, Film-Courier 289 (10 December 1934), in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942; Hermann Killer ‘Eröffnung der Deutschen Tanzfestspiele 1934. Yvonne Georgi, Harald Kreutzberg und Gret Palucca’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berliner Ausgabe) 345 (11 December 1934, in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942). 37 Fritz Böhme ‘Der Tänzer Harald Kreutzberg’, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung 467 (23 December 1933, in SAdK, Palucca Archiv 4090): ‘Diese Kunst ist rein auf Genuß gestellt. Sie läßt sich genießen im Anschauen. Das ist ihre Höhe, aber auch ihre Grenze. Man hat nicht das Gefühl des eben Entstehenden, sondern neben dem genießenden Aufnehmen der Formen spürt man: das ist einmal in einer glücklichen Stunde geschaffen, früher, und wird nun wiederholt, sehr gut und geschliffen, aber doch nicht ganz durchpulst, es wird nicht. Durch diese vielleicht zu weit getriebene Form kommt eine gewisse Kälte und zu grosse Distanz in die Tänze, man genießt vorzügliche Leistungen, aber man wird nicht von Unmittelbarkeiten und Imponderabilien des Lebens berührt. Sie werden nicht Erlebnis. Wir fassen nicht den Menschen, sondern der Schauspieler-Tänzer produziert sich vor uns. Diese Grenze würde man vielleicht weniger fühlen, wenn Kreutzberg in einem Ensemble wirkte, vielleicht sogar schon, wenn er eine Partnerin hätte [. . .]’ In his review, ‘Beginn der “Deutschen Tanzfestspiele 1934”’, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung 576 (10 December 1934, in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942), Böhme had only praise for Kreutzberg’s performances of the same dances he criticized the previous year. 38 ‘Wohl in Amerika, das er in den letzten Jahren öfteren bereiste, hat er gelernt, mit welchen Mitteln er sein Publikum “erobert”, und man möchte wünschen, daß seine Künstlerpersönlichkeit nicht den Gefahren allzu großer Virtuosität unerliegt.’ in O.W., ‘Auftakt der Deutschen Tanzfestspiele’, op. cit.

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‘Deutsche Tanzfestspiele in Berlin’, op. cit.: ‘Es ist alles freier Ablauf inneren Geschehens in rhapsodischer Form, Expressionismus […]’ 40 The term ‘Caesarenwahn’ literally means ‘Caesar madness’, which in German refers to the complex of a dictator insatiably driven to acquire power. 41 Kreutzberg originally danced Narrentanz in Max Terpis’s ballet Don Morte (Berlin Staatsoper, 12 May 1926, music by Friedrich Wilckens). Although the ballet, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s story, The Masque of the Red Death (1842), was not a success, Kreutzberg won critical acclaim for his dancing and began a life-long association with Wilckens. 42 K.[arl] G.[ustav] Grabe, ‘Deutschlands beste Tänzer im Wettstreit. Verheißungsvoller Auftakt der Festspiele 1934’, Der Angriff (Berlin) 289 (10 December 1934), in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942): ‘Ein weiser, wissender, fühlender Narr. Mensch w i l l er sein, Narr m u ß er sein. Qualvoll taumelt er durch den Käfig seines Narren-Ichs’. 43 In her thesis Weiler (1980) noted that, according to the dancer’s accompanist and manager, Friedrich Wilcken, Kreutzberg always viewed himself as a ‘non-political’ artist. 44 L.M., ‘Beginn der Tanzfestspiele’, op. cit. 45 F.J.Kl. ‘Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934’, op. cit. 46 Dotzler, op. cit. 47 Prilipp, op. cit. 48 Fritz Zielesch, ‘Das Fest der Tanzkunst’, Berliner Tageblatt 581 (10 December 1934), in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942. 49 Lck, ‘Auftakt der Tanzwoche. Matinee am Horst-Wessel-Platz: Georgi, Palucca, Kreutzberg’, in Kreuz-Zeitung, Berlin 289 (11 December 1934), in SAdK, PaluccaArchiv 3942. 50 Fritz Zielesch, ‘Das Fest der 200 Tänzer. Der erste Tag der deutschen TanzFestspiele in der Volksbühne’, in Berliner Volkszeitung 582 (10 December 1934), in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942. 51 L.M. (‘Beginn der Tanzfestspiele’, op. cit., called it a ‘disunited […] series of rhythmic exercises’. K. G. Grabe, ‘Deutschlands beste Tänzer’, op. cit., dismissed the piece as mathematical and cool, while Nn, ‘Deutsche Art im deutschen Tanz’, Der Westen (Berlin), 337 (10 December 1934), in SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942, complained that the choreography was too intellectual. A few critics, for example Fritz Zielesch, ‘Das Fest der Tanzkunst’, op. cit., admired the piece. Fritz Böhme, ‘Beginn der “Deutschen Tanzfestspiele 1934”’, op. cit., compared the choreography to the ornamental tracery of a Gothic church. 52 The other major scholarly works on Wigman are Müller's Mary Wigman (1986a) and ‘Die Begründung’ (1986b). Wigman’s generally uncritical descriptions of her dances tends to bear out Manning's analysis; see Claudia Gitelman, ed., Liebe Hanya. Mary Wigman’s Letters to Hanya Holm, trans. Marianne Forster, Cataherine T. Klingler, Shelley Frisch, and Joanna Ratych (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 51-56. 53 The same ensemble produced a similar group cycle for the ‘3. Deutscher Tänzerkongress. Deutsche Tänzerwoche’ (held in Munich in 1930), entitled Barbarische Suite (‘für Tanz, Blockflöten, und Schlagzeug-orchester’). The movements consisted of Treibende Rhythmen, Liedhaft, Paukentanz, Kanon, and

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Sprungtanz. Like Klänge und Gesichte, Barbarische Suite has not been the subject of scrutiny in the secondary literature. 54 ‘Die heiteren sind Mädchentänze, reigenhaft aufgebaut und begleitet mit Cimbeln, Flöten und Schellen. Die düsteren symbolisieren einerseits die dunkele Seite des Lebens, andererseits den Kampf zwischen Allen und dem Einen. An der Kraft des Einen zerschellt die Auflehnung der Masse. Die hellen Tänze bilden den spannunglösenden Ausklang, in dem alle Tanzenden sich zu einer freien Gemeinschaft einen. Die musikalische Begleitung ist zum Teil in den Tanz selbst einbezogen und von Tänzern ausgeführt, sie bedient sich hauptsächlich alter deutscher Instrumente.’ 55 Dotzler, ‘Die Deutschen Tanzfestspiele 1934’, op. cit. 56 Gunild Keetman, who was collaborating at this same time with Carl Orff on their first pedagogical work, composed the music. Both Orff and Keetman were associated with Günther’s school in Munich, and all three would be invited to participate in creating massive presentations for the Berlin Olympics in 1936, as would Wigman, Palucca and Kreutzberg. Laban was also invited, but Goebbels ultimately rejected his contribution. 57 Cesar Bresgen, who wrote the music for Der Ballspieler, also provided music for the Hitlerjugend. Wigman’s musical collaborator, Hanns Hasting, composed music for similar youth activities. 58 Friedrich W. Herzog, ‘Tanzfestspiele 1934 in der Volksbühne’, Die Musik 4 (January 1935), SAdK, Palucca-Archiv 3942: ‘Es hat keinen Sinn, Kabarettnummern gutgewachsener Blondinen durch Namesnennung auch nur einen Schein von Bedeutung zu geben.’ 59 The report is transcribed in Müller and Stöckemann (1993: 156-8). 60 Evidence of this kind of compromise survives in Palucca’s letter to Laban, quoted above, in note 24. 61 The program was printed in the prospectus as follows: 1) Festspielgruppe junger Tänzer: Solos, Duos, Trios, and small ensembles. (‘Inspired by Folk Dances’): 1) Ländlicher Tanz [ensemble dance, choreogr. Wilmo Kamrath], (2) Nebel und Sonne [choreography: Gertrud Wienecke], (3) Walzer aus dem Ballet, Schlagobers (music: Richard Strauss). 2) Die alte Komödie, after the music of Robert Schumann [Carnival], Jens Keith (also choreographer) and the Ensemble of the Städtische Bühnen Essen. 3) Die ungeratene Tochter, after the ballet music to ‘Scarlattiana’ by Alfredo Casella. Valeria Kratina, Ensemble of Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe.

REFERENCES Böhme, F. (1934) ‘Die “Deutschen Tanzfestspiele 1934”’ in: Singchor und Tanz 51/12 (16 Dezember). Broszat, M. (1992) Der Staat Hitlers, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Dahms, S. (ed.) (2001) Tanz. Reihe MGG Prisma, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001. Davies, C. (2000)The Volksbühne Movement. A History, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. ‘Directive 48’ (1935) Der Tanz 8: 4-10.

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Dörr, E. (1998) Rudolf von Laban: Leben und Werk des Künstlers (1879-1936), Berlin: Diss. Humboldt University. Erdmann-Rajski, K.(2000) Gret Palucca: Tanz und Zeiterfahrung in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert: Weimarer Republik, Nationalsozialismus, Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag. Fröhlich, E. (ed.) (1987) Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Sämtliche Fragmente, Teil 1, Aufzeichnungen 1924-1941. Vol. 2; 1931-1936. Munich: K. G. Sauer. Gitelman, C. (ed.) (2003) Liebe Hanya. Mary Wigman's Letters to Hanya Holm, Trans. Marianne Forster, Catherine T. Klongler, Shelley Frisch, and Joanna Ratych. Introd. Hedwig Müller, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Goebbels, J. (1933) ‘Das deutsche Theater und seine Aufgaben’ in Der Autor 8/5, May. Hodgson, J. & Perston-Dunlop, V. (1990) Rudolf Laban: An Introduction to his Work and Influence, Plymouth: Northcote House Educational Publishers. Karina, L. & Kant, M. (1996) Tanz unterm Hakenkreuz. Eine Dokumentation. Berlin: Henschel Verlag. Kiehn, U. (1994) ‘Volksbühne Berlin 1933-44’, MA. Freie Universität Berlin. Laban, R. von (ed.) (1934) Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 unter Förderung der Reichskulturkammer, Dresden: Carl Reißner. Manning, S. A. (1993) Ecstasy and the Demon. Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Müller, H. (1986a) Mary Wigman: Leben und Werk der großen Tänzerin, Weinheim, Berlin: Quadriga, 1986. Müller, H. (1986b) ‘Die Begründung des Ausdruckstanzes durch Mary Wigman’, Diss. Cologne U. Müller, H. & Stöckemann, P. (1993) ‘…jeder Mensch ist ein Tänzer’. Ausdruckstanz in Deutschland zwischen 1900 und 1945, Giessen: Anabas-Verlag, 1993. Perston-Dunlop, V. (1998) Rudolf Laban: An Extraordinary Life, [n.l.]: Dance Books, Ltd. Peter, F.-M. (1997) Der Tänzer Harald Kreuzberg, Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1997. Rischbieter, H. (ed.) (2000) Theater im ‘Dritten Reich’: Theaterpolitk, Spielplannstruktur, NS-Dramatik, Leipzig: Kallmeyer, 2000. Sauter, W. (2000) The Theatrical Event. Dynamics of Performance and Perception, Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2000. Servos, N. (1998) ‘Ausdruckstanz’ in International Encyclopedia of Dance, (ed.) Selma Jeanne Cohen. Vol. 1. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press: 204. Steinweiss, A. E. (1993) Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Weiler, B. (1980) ‘Harald Kreutzbergs Tänze und Gestalten’, MA, LudwigMaximilians-Universität.

IRANIAN THEATRE FESTIVALISED FARAH YEGANEH

Since festival culture is, perhaps, a unique phenomenon in Iran that is closely linked with the daily theatre life in the country, it is essential briefly to review theatre in Iran as a whole as an extended prologue to this article. As we shall demonstrate, in contrast to other parts of the world, each theatrical production in Iran is premiered at a festival and then is later staged publicly throughout the year, almost always by the same institution that premiered it. This means that the structural concept of the theatrical event in this article is very much dominated by the organisation and the genres of festivals – referred to as contextual theatricality. In this regard, the theatrical playing will be illustrated in connection with some of the festivals, particularly with the International Fajr Theatre Festival. Iranian playing culture would very well deserve an article of its own, since this article will not allow more than occasional hints at the subject. IRANIAN THEATRE: HISTORY AND STRUCTURE Theatre in its current form has a history of only one hundred years in Iran. Nevertheless, theatrical productions have developed a considerable variety of expressive styles during this period. Some plays are socially minded, some maintain a traditional style, while the younger theatre makers produce interesting experimental plays on small stages based on an ensemble spirit.1 The Iranian professional theatre movement is especially active in Iran’s main city, Tehran, with about 150 shows each year including the festivals (DAC 2002a: 7). This professional activity is reinforced by the work done in some of the biggest cities of the country. There are some forty permanent theatre groups, whose repertoires combine Iranian plays as well as contemporary and classical world theatre – the other five thousand amateurs and semi-professionals gather together to shape a production and then return to their daily lives. The number of the annual stage performances at public and private theatre halls amounts to 4 000 all over the country, not including the 8 000 streettheatre ones.

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After twenty years of isolation, contacts with the outside world have begun to increase since 2000. There have been attempts to participate in international festivals such as the Edinburgh Festival and Theater der Welt. There has also been some communication and cooperation with a few international theatrical institutions such as the International Theatre Institute, UNIMA and the International Theatre Critics Association (initiated in the 1990s). There is much hope and a strong desire for more extensive mutual contacts in future on the side of Iranian theatre makers. Universities are the most important institutions for promoting national theatre. Since 1995 graduates from theatre schools and colleges have worked towards this goal. The number of university graduates in the field of theatre alone amounts to 900 per year. Apart from the universities offering majors and courses on different fields in theatre, there are a lot of private academies and institutes teaching theatre. The number of these privately run drama and theatre schools increases year by year. This applies to writing as well, courses and workshops having spread throughout the country, though many of these have been sparked off by the demands of multi-channel television. Thus, a new generation of actors and directors is certainly arriving with fresh visions of their own. The only existing research institution is the ‘Theatre Research Centre’ of the Art University – established in 2001, a new centre attempting to be active in the field – though what is observed is that individual research, if any, is more common. It seems that the state is attempting to initiate activities encouraging academic research in all fields (Yeganeh 2002: 179). ORGANISATION AND CULTURAL CONTEXT The most important decision-making centre for theatre in Iran is the Dramatic Arts Centre (DAC), the theatrical branch of the Ministry of Culture. The head office of this centre is located in Tehran, and it has various branches in other large cities and towns. All major events and significant activities of a theatrical nature such as the arrangement of annual performance schedules, the management of theatre halls and holding most festivals are under the supervision of this centre. In addition, the DAC is the main sponsor of many theatre performances during the year. Performing groups have contracts with the Centre, and the Centre is obliged to pay them according to the contract, no

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matter how well or badly the performance has done at the box office. This indicates that there is almost no private self-administered theatre in Iran. Perhaps the positive aspect of this financial dependence on the DAC is that the theatre groups can have new initiatives without being too worried about the audience’s interests and tastes. The government and parliament approve the budget for theatre, since both the legislative and the executive powers have to confirm it. The DAC, which represents the Iranian Centre of the International Theatre Institute, was established after the Revolution under an Act of Parliament, as the theatrical branch of the Ministry of Culture for specific purposes such as promoting Iranian theatrical activities and providing financial assistance to performing artists. The development policy of the DAC remains the focal point of theatre production and the funding body for theatre activities.2 Because the DAC, as a state agency, has an important mission of cultural diffusion, it attempts to make the theatre more accessible, and is at the centre of every development in Iranian theatre. Its responsibilities include stimulating theatrical life in smaller towns, and offering opportunities to young artists, university graduates and other talented newcomers to produce their performances. As far as the reform of the state theatres and the net of stages spread across the country are concerned, all theatre makers agree that the civic subsidy guarantees not only creative freedom but also access to the arts for all citizens – though the DAC clearly takes care that the performances do not offend religiously and politically. Since most performances cannot pay for more than a fraction of production and operating costs, the country’s public theatres receive public funds within the framework of a subsidising system. An extensive guild union was established in 1999 called Khaneye-theatre (The House of Theatre) embracing all theatre professionals in its various societies with the purpose of supporting theatre people. The forum consists of a number of societies that work for their members’ rights as well as introducing them to the market. At present, these societies include: Playwrights’ Forum; Artistic Directors’ Forum; Actors’ Forum; Stage Managers’ Forum; Theatre Instructors’ and Scholars’ Forum; Puppet Play Performers’ Forum; Make-Up Designers’ Forum; Stage Designers’ Forum; and Critics’ and Authors’ Forum. The House of Theatre currently has 850 members – mostly Tehranis – it is estimated that the total number of theatre artists is

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about 7 000 throughout the country. This centre has also various weekly and monthly programmes such as introducing playwrights, artists’ memorials, play-reading sessions, holding seminars and presenting educational films in which all members can participate in order to exchange new experiences. Though a professional union, this institution is also dependent on state finance through the Ministry of Culture and Tehran Municipality (Yeganeh 2002: 179). In addition to these, the cultural and artistic organisations of municipalities have constructed and established fairly small halls under the name of Farhang-sara (meaning ‘a little home for culture’) in which theatrical activities by amateurs or semi-professionals take place occasionally and where annual mini-festivals are held. The Art Bureau of the Islamic Propagation Organisation is also occasionally involved in holding festivals, publishing books and journals, and providing performance facilities. Other state organisations such as the police, the military, the Welfare Organisation, The Ministry of Education, the Prisoners Organisation and other governmental agencies also hold festivals. Though the licences for the activities of these centres are issued by the DAC, they are completely autonomous as far as administration and budgets are concerned. They act according to their own aims and objectives. SITES Four main theatre halls and complexes are owned, maintained and managed by the DAC in Tehran, which are also used at the time of festivals: the City Theatre Complex – with its seven stages, built in 1972 and hosting big audiences, is a cultural centre of national importance; the Sangeladj Hall is one of the oldest theatre buildings (constructed in 1962); the Honar Hall (the Art Hall) is mostly used for puppet theatre; the Vahdat Hall, the biggest and the most magnificent venue, built in 1967, is usually used for larger and occasionally more commercial productions.3 There is also a Molavi Hall (built in 1972) owned and managed by Tehran University, which is used as a festival venue. Outside Tehran festival sites are normally the local theatre buildings or other venues especially designated for such festivals. It is quite obvious that the capital city of Tehran is highly privileged and thus reflects the cultural centralisation of theatre.

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RANGE OF IRANIAN THEATRE The spectrum of Iranian theatre ranges from commercial popular entertainment to the fringe groups or the so-called alternative theatres.4 Although one can observe in recent years a determined effort to promote alternative theatre, many of these groups work under permanently precarious financial conditions. Besides, most of the few private theatres, because dependent on the box office, offer commercial and/or traditional plays, though they must get a performance licence from the DAC. During the past year about 150 productions were staged in Tehran alone. They can be categorised into three main groups: foreign plays, Iranian plays and traditional Iranian plays. The production of foreign plays in Persian began about a hundred years ago with the dramatization of Molière’s masterpieces, and is still being practised as a serious subdivision of Iranian theatre. Directors of these works, who are often professional and well-experienced figures in theatre, try to stage the performances by dramatising the text and finding a correlation between the context of the play and topical social issues, thereby creating communication between Iran and other countries through the gates of theatre. Recent examples of this type of work include Servants based on Jean Genet’s The Maids, directed by Ali Rafie; Poor Bitos by Jean Anouilh, directed by Hamid Mozaffari; Medea by Dario Fo, directed by Sohrab Salimi; Antigone written by Sophocles, directed by Majid Ja’afari; and Cain by Georg Kaiser, directed by Ghotbeddin Sadeghi. Of recent performances, about twenty may be listed in this category. One critic has stated that Iranian playwrights, especially since the 1960s, have tried to both directly demonstrate the problems and needs of their country and make developments in playwriting techniques. She adds that ‘it is worth mentioning that during the past five years, there has been a new movement in playwriting by young innovative playwrights, which has obviously resulted in new and different forms of performance’ (Samini 2004: 83). Some of the works performed during 2004, such as Autumn (directed Nader Borhani Marand), which focuses on the of impact of war, have been able to make use of international forms of playwriting and staging while maintaining their Iranian atmosphere, context and relationships. A lot of productions deal with the role of women in society; examples include Impossible to Believe (written by Chista Yassrebi and directed

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by Sima Tirandaz), or on the disillusionment emerging out of difficult social conditions like The Same Ever Happening (directed by Rima Raminfar). Some of the productions do not limit themselves to geographical borders and explore the story universally – not only in form but in geographical location as well; Secrets and Lies (directed by Kiumars Moradi) is set in ancient Rome and deals with Christ’s crucifixion. There have also been experimental works. In I’m Going Out to Buy a Newspaper (directed by Rahim Noroozi) four characters narrate their lives individually, each in separate small rooms. In Shut Up, That’s Enough (by Atila Pessyani) the identities of Pinocchio, an Afghan man and woman, and Don Quixote are linked together. Some productions base themselves on ancient tragic Iranian plays such as Taziyeh or comic plays such as Siyah Bazi.5 Among recent performances based on traditional theatre, Three Little Houses (directed by Mehrdad Rayani) and The Bridge (written and directed by Mohammad Rahmanian) can be named – both based in form and context on Taziyeh. CONTEXTUAL THEATRICALITY OF IRANIAN FESTIVALS Festivals form the basis of theatre in Iran, with some fifty having been held annually since 1979. This means that in comparison with the permanent theatre in the country, festivals dominate theatrical culture in Iran.6 The professional space for theatre people is more or less limited to festivals, and for this reason all theatre workers attempt to be present at festivals. Festivals have the largest share in providing theatre in other regions than Tehran where there is little or no permanent continuous theatre. All festivals are arranged by state organisations and institutions, and have different purposes such as the promotion of the art of theatre, cultural activities, self-propaganda, propagation of ideas and beliefs (police force festivals, rehabilitation centre festivals, prisoners’ festivals, etc.). Some festivals are international, meaning that there are also some four to ten foreign performances present. They include the International Fajr Theatre Festival, International Fajr Student Theatre Festival, Isfahan’s International Comic Theatre Festival, International Ritualistic-Traditional Theatre Festival, International Puppet Theatre Festival, International Student Puppet Theatre Festival, and International Iranzamin Theatre Festival (Rayani 2001: 86).

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Winter-time audiences of a puppet street theatre at Fajr Theatre Festival. Photo by Ebrahim Hosseini.

Some festivals are national, such as the National Police Force Theatre Festival, Fat’h Theatre Festival, Missagh Theatre Festival (of the military forces), Nomads Theatre Festival (in the nomadic western parts of Iran), Atashkar Theatre Festival (of and for metallurgical workers), Red Tulips’ Theatre Festival, National Mah Theatre Festival, Women’s National Theatre Festival, Regions Annual Theatre Festivals (the country is divided into six regions), the States’ Annual Theatre Festivals (the country is divided politically into twenty-eight states), the Prisoners’ Theatre Festival, Holy Defence Theatre Festival (on Iran-Iraq war), the Shahed Theatre Festival. Some festivals are regional or are held inside one state: Abadan’s Holy Defence Theatre Festival (Abadan is the most important city in the south of Iran attacked by Saddam’s forces), Azna Theatre Festival, Minab Short Plays Festival, Tirang Theatre Festival, Gilan Theatre Festival, Mazandaran Theatre Festival, Shiraz Modern Theatre Festival. They amount to about forty annually and usually take their names from the area or town they are held in. Some festivals have existed for one or more years and then disappeared, like the Red Crescent Theatre Festival, Tomorrow Performers Theatre Festival,

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PsychodramaTheatre Festival, Young Taziyeh Performers Festival, Mehr Theatre Festival, Villages Theatre Festival, etc. Some of the former festivals may be revived again after a few years because of new policies (Rayani 2001: 86). In general festivals – almost all of them being of the out-of-thebox kind – start their work with a public invitation, advertised everywhere, asking theatre groups to send their texts to the festival secretariat, while mentioning the festival terms and conditions such as the deadline and theme. Later, a text-selection board – a preliminary jury comprised mostly of theatre professionals plus, perhaps, one or two officials involved in theatre – will choose the best texts in accordance with the rules of the festival. Initially three times as many texts will be selected than will finally be shown. The chosen groups will then begin rehearsals, during which the board has to select the best one third of them to be performed in the festival. Another jury – with almost the same structure – will offer the prizes in a closing ceremony after observing all performances. Iranian festivals are held during very short periods of three to twelve days. The mini-festivals, which can also be called community festivals, have a life of 3–4 days; the average event takes 6–7 days; and the larger ones like those mentioned below may take up to 10–12 days.7 Hence, the detachment from everyday life does obviously take place for all those involved: the organisers, the performers and even the audience; and the emotional involvement – or the flow – remains really intense all through the festival period. Iranian festivals offer programmes of high density – what Jacqueline Martin and Willmar Sauter speak of in their writings. Every geographical state in Iran holds a competitive statefunded festival each year under the direction of the DAC – the total number all over the country being twenty-eight. The budgets are funded by the Bureau of Culture – the state branch of Ministry of Culture. From every state festival, two or three theatrical works are selected to participate in a regional festival. Two or three performances are selected from each regional festival of the country’s six regions; thus about eighteen works have the opportunity to participate in the International Fajr Theatre Festival – the most significant theatrical event taking place in the country – towards the end of the Iranian calendar and the beginning of the Christian one. The mentioned figure excludes the theatre performances from the city

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of Tehran. Tehrani groups enter the main competition of the festival on the basis that they are of a higher quality (DAC 2002: 56). The Art Bureau of the Islamic Propagation Organisation used to hold an annual festival called ‘Sooreh’, which was held twelve times. In 2003 the whole theatrical branch of the Art Bureau underwent substantial structural changes, including the authorities and the festival. The new inaugural festival, called the National Mah Festival, was very successful – its jury is made up of six famous theatre professionals and one foreign judge – and is expected to become more acknowledged and extensive in the future. As a side-event, it held a seminar for theatre critics, with a foreign instructor giving a lecture and an extensive seminar on theatre issues in Iran involving famous theatre people and officials. The order observed in the festival was unique amongst all festivals held up to the present. It was noted that all theatre people had been somehow engaged in the festival and no interested parties had been excluded. The best play of the festival Artigoshe (based on Antigone) has gained a reputation and has already been invited to a few international festivals overseas. (National Mah Theatre Festival 2004:2) Questionnaires are handed out during some of the festivals, especially the bigger events, and observations confirm that they are influential within the ‘contextual theatricality’ of the festivals, while the official organisers take care that the modifications should not affect the cultural context. The main purpose of distributing the questionnaires is to investigate audience tastes and evaluations for future festivals. One exclusive factor, which tends to limit attendance, especially of the foreign guest performances with their “special event” status, is ticket prices. Also, for many of the performances in the mega-festivals the limitation of the number of performances of each production leads to a rush of audiences usually causing a shortage of tickets, which can be regarded as another exclusive factor. FESTIVALS CONTEXTUALISED8 An International Puppet Festival is held biennially by the DAC in September in Tehran, for both adults and children, with the participation of various Iranian groups and a few foreign companies. The festival is one of the most interesting because of the presence of excellent puppetry from all over the world. It is a ten-day period of

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fantasy and dream, taking the audience to the land of marionettes and puppets. Some productions such as A Puppet Show in Qajar Tradition (by Behrooz Gharibpoor) deal with the traditional form of Iranian puppet play, whereas other performances like Deadly Episodes (written by Nader Borhani and directed by Azadeh Ansari) attempt to communicate with all audiences by eliminating the barrier of language and focusing on the global theme of death (DAC 2003a: 47). Another biennial festival held by the DAC is the National Traditional and Ritualistic Festival with various theatrical performances based on rituals and traditional Iranian theatre in the form of stage-shows and street-theatre productions. Lots of shows from all parts of the country in various performing styles and multiple subjects participate in the festival in order to reveal and reinterpret traditional Iranian performance forms. Some of the performances can be adaptations of famous Western texts, such as The Bizarre Sea (by Atila Pesyani) based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and The Shabihkhani of the Little Prince (by Ali Asghar Dashti), based on The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry. The most recent festival (the twelfth) was labelled ‘International’ – more correctly, it should have been entitled ‘Asian’ – because the Iranian Centre of the International Theatre Institute invited three traditional performances from Japan, South Korea and China (DAC 2003b: 5, 29, 78) One of the mega-events is the International Fajr Theatre Festival held annually in Tehran at the end of January – the time of the anniversary festivities of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 – with the participation of about eight foreign and fifty-five Iranian theatre companies in four different sections: the Domestic Contest (for the young or non-famous professionals), the Fringe (or out-of-contest section, for the Iranian theatre famous professionals), the International Section and the Street Theatre Section – of which the first and the fourth sections are competitive. The festival, in a nutshell, reflects the characteristics of Iranian theatre, and some believe that it has contributed to international exchanges and the development of the national theatre movement. Its total budget amounts to €700 000, all paid by the government through the Ministry of Culture (DAC 2003c: 59). In the 1999–2000 theatre season, the Eighteenth Festival took place with the participation of fifty-seven Iranian groups, five foreign companies from Germany, Armenia, Sweden, Norway and Italy, and

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forty-six Iranian street-theatre troupes; and the festival hosted audiences of 100 000 in its twelve-day run. Following its goals of communication between the West and Asia, the German Theater an der Ruhr started its theatrical activity in Iran with this festival for the first time with productions such as Kaspar and Before the Millennium Makes us Apart. Its presence in the theatre atmosphere of Iran, including the Fajr Festival, has continued up to the present in the form of a contract. All accepted plays to Fajr have public performances during the next year. Works by famous directors are placed on the Fringe so that the young have enough opportunity for competition. The Festival demonstrates the continued interest in the performing arts as a profession. Two performances entitled Shabha-ye-Avignon (Avignon Nights) and Vaghti Ma Bargardim (When We Come Back), directed by Koorosh Narimani and Ebrahim Poshtekoohi respectively, jointly won the prize for the best direction. Avignon Nights was also awarded the first prize for its dramatic text. Pantea Bahram was selected as the best actress in Pas, Ta Farda (So, Till Tomorrow), and Siamak Safari who had played in Avignon Nights took the prize for the best actor (DAC 2000). In the 2000-2001 season, the Nineteenth Fajr was held in January 2001 with the participation of thirty-seven Iranian groups, thirteen foreign companies, including participants from Greece, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria and China, twenty-one productions on the Fringe and forty-three Iranian street-theatre troupes. In this season a student section was added to the festival that involved participation by twenty-five university student groups – later this section was presented separately as an independent event held by the Ministry of Higher Education. The most significant event of the festival was the attendance of the Peking Opera with their fantastic performance of Lady Yang, which amazed and charmed every member of the Iranian audience. During the festival a workshop on sound and movement was held for the theatre students with English tutors; and 120 000 spectators attended the Festival. Saadat-e Larzan-e Mardoman-e Tirehrooz (Unfortunate People’s Shaky Happiness) written by Alireza Naderi won the first prize for its dramatic text. The best actor selected was Amir Jafari for acting in Yek Daghigheh Sokoot (One-Minute Silence) and Regisseurha Nemimirand (Directors Do Not Die), and Setareh Eskandari was awarded the first prize for the best actress for acting in Unfortunate People’s Shaky Happiness (DAC 2001).

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Fajr Theatre Festival; a street performance; performed in the open space in front of Tehran City Theatre which is situated in the city centre in the middle of a park. Photo by Ali Oghazian.

The Twentieth International Fajr Theatre Festival, held in January 2002, included the participation of thirty-three Iranian groups for the contest section, twenty Iranian groups in the Fringe section (the masters), foreign companies from Russia, Germany, Italy, Greece, Syria, Egypt and Canada, thirty-one street-theatre groups, and twentyseven student troupes. The Theater an der Ruhr presented a performance of The House of Bernarda Alba written by Federico Garcia Lorca in collaboration with the DAC; the performance was directed by Roberto Ciulli and performed by Iranian actresses – it had its premiere in the main hall of the City Theatre in June 2002. The Festival also held a workshop on lighting and scenography by German tutors; and it is estimated that about 140 000 people attended the Festival. Neda Hengami won the first prize for her stage directing of Azhedahak, Mohammad-Bagher Banayi was awarded the first prize for writing the playscript of Sabz, Sohrab, Sorkh (Green, Sohrab, Crimson). Sima Tirandaz won the first prize for acting in Mahale Fekr Konin Iynjouri Ham Momkeneh Besheh (Impossible to Believe) as the best actress, and Davar Farmani got the prize for the best actor for

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performing in Green, Sohrab, Crimson. Amir Koohestani, the young director of Raghs Rooye Livanha (Dance on Glasses) attracted the attention of the German authorities and was invited to perform his play in Germany (DAC 2002b). In these three seasons classics by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Albee, Sartre and Genet were the staple fare of both traditional and avantgarde companies. The texts were treated either with meticulous respect or with a sense of complete reinterpretation. Ordinarily, national seminars and conferences concerning different aspects of theatre are held during the festivals. Apart from those, the annual National Seminar on Taziyeh – the famous Iranian passion play – is a spectacle held in May for three days with about ten lectures on the subject and about twelve Taziyeh performances in various traditional sites famous for their mosques and Tekiehs (a special performance stage for Taziyeh). The seminar is held every year in one of the states, preferably in those with the traditional sites. CONCLUSION This article has focused on the structures, the organisational forms and the contextual theatricality of Iranian theatre festivals, illustrating the inevitable and essential function of cultural politics -- including the lack of support or subsidies for commercial theatre. It would have been equally interesting to present various styles and traditions within Iranian theatre, but these would not directly relate to the issue of festivalisation. The same is true about the extensive forms of playing cultures both in modern cities and in the traditional rural areas; they are well worth studying, but are not intensively functional or decisive as far as theatre festivals are concerned. Some people believe that these festivals have become the most significant channels enhancing – and ‘eventifying’ – theatre life in the country; and that young theatre groups have become more active by participating in them. What is appealing, and perhaps appalling, is that this research reveals that the whole structure of theatre in Iran is, intentionally or unintentionally, based on festivals. Because theatre in its Western form is definitely not a part of our people’s playing culture, every theatrical production – perhaps with the exception of Tehran – can attract audiences enough for just two or three performances and then disappears. The different trends and approaches in Iranian theatre observed in festivals reflect the debate

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going on among artists and critics. On one side are the nationalists, who think that the future of our theatre lies in rediscovering the truest national form, lost due to long negligence and ideological indifference. On the other side are the proponents of modernity, who think that our theatre in the twenty-first century can develop only in close conjunction with the theatres of the world, and claim that the futile search for purity will deny theatre its vigour and originality. _________________________ NOTES 1

By ‘traditional’ is meant that the content and form of the theatrical performances are considered to be exclusively Iranian with roots in Iranian culture. In making these performances, traditional Iranian approaches are used. The expression ‘experimental theatre’ is used for those performances that differ from the dominant realist trend that the masses can understand and enjoy. They usually use modernist or postmodernist features or frames only understood and enjoyed by a small section of the Iranian theatre-going public. Experimental theatre emerged in Iran in the 1960s. 2 The DAC has established a relatively active centre for publication of theatrical books in its publication department, and published about twenty books in 2002–3 season. It also publishes Theatre, which is a monthly journal. Other journals concerning theatre are The Stage, published by the Art Bureau of Islamic Propagation Organisation, Dramatic Arts Monthly, privately run and therefore intermittent in its publication, Theatre Quarterly (by DAC), and Art Quarterly by the Art Research and Studies Centre of the Art Department of the Ministry of Culture. A considerable increase can be observed in the publication of theatre books – especially in the private sector – compared with the first twenty years after the Revolution (1979). 3 The main hall seats an audience of 600, and the other six – some of them small studios – seat between 70 and 200 people. Sangelaj Hall has 370 seats, Honar Hall 300 seats and Vahdat Hall 900 seats in the pit and galleries; it also has the most technical facilities. 4 They are considered to belong to the fringe, or called ‘alternative groups’, because they do their best to remain experimental. 5 Taziyeh is the Iranio-Islamic passion play narrating the story of martyrdom of Shiite’s third saint and his friends, and the sufferings of his family according to Shiite theology. Siyah-Bazi is an Iranian traditional comedy very much like Commedia dell’Arte. Some believe that the roots are the same, while others believe that it took its theatrical shape purely from Iranian entertainments. 6 The year 1979 was the year of the Revolution, when the Kingdom of Iran (2500 years old) changed to the Islamic Republic of Iran. 7 This means that they are either held in a region (that is, the artists and audience belong to that region), or they are arranged by a specific organisation (like the Rehabilitation Ministry or Military Forces) which is propagandising specific slogans, and again, the participants and audience are members of the organisation or their families and relatives.

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8

Due to the shortage of documentation and statistics about festivals – or their unreliability – the article is mostly based on field research and longitudinal personal observations over several years, as well as interviews and talks with theatre professionals.

REFERENCES DAC (2000) Catalogue of 18th International Fajr Theatre Festival, Tehran: DAC Publications. DAC (2001) Catalogue of 19th International Fajr Theatre Festival, Tehran: DAC Publications. DAC (2002a) Quarterly Statistics Pamphlets Tehran: DAC. DAC (2002b) Catalogue of 20th International Fajr Theatre Festival, Tehran: DAC Publications. DAC (2003a) Catalogue of International Puppet Theatre Festival of Tehran, Tehran: DAC Publications. DAC (2003b) Catalogue of 12th International Traditional and Ritualistics Theatre Festival, Tehran: DAC Publications. DAC 2003c), Quarterly Statistics Pamphlets, Tehran: DAC Publications. National Mah Theatre Festival (2004) Daily Bulletins, 1, December, Tehran: Art Bureau of Islamic Propagation Organisation. Rayani, M. (2001) ‘Festivals Ruin the Majority in Theatre’, Bidar Monthly, 12, February. Samini, N. (2004) ‘Iran’ in World of Theatre, Bangladesh: Shahita Prakash. Yeganeh, F. (2003) ‘Iran’ in World of Theatre, London: Routledge.

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THE ISRAELI NATIONAL COMMUNITY THEATRE FESTIVAL: THE REAL AND THE IMAGINED SHULAMITH LEV-ALADGEM

Community theatre in Israel is a local-specific popular theatre that aims at generating social change and empowerment within marginal communities. It emerged at the beginning of the 1970s, in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, in several disadvantaged neighbourhoods that were mostly inhabited by Mizrahi Jews (originating from Moslem countries), who appropriated community theatre as a symbolic weapon to counteract their low cultural and socio-political status. Today community theatre is a dynamic cultural practice of and for communities such as the Mizrahi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Jews from the former USSR, Israeli Arabs, the disabled, prisoners and battered women. All these groups generally share a similar socio-aesthetic pattern, which characterises the Israeli version of community theatre and also differentiates it from any other form of amateur theatre. Each group consists of local non-professional performers who are first and foremost activist representatives of their own community. These performers, guided by a theatre practitioner, create original performances, based on their own life materials, and present them in front of their local community in order to stimulate self-reflexivity and raise consciousness. There are currently many community theatres operating independently in various places throughout the country, and thus the explicit intentions of the national community theatre festival are to facilitate interaction between the groups, to discuss mutual practical issues and to try to reach more institutional recognition and thus more finance for additional community projects (Alfi 2002). Having been involved in the field of community theatre for many years as a practitioner, teacher and researcher, I find the festival a special frame of eventness for exploring the political energies of community theatre. As all the community theatres exist on the geographical, social and artistic margins, I suggest here that the concept of an annual national festival that gathers together different communities in an elegant theatre building in the centre of the country is somewhat of a subversive tactic that manifests the joint move of the powerless from the margins to the centre in order to transform the

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invisible into the visible. This celebration implies that marginal groups, referred to in this chapter as co-communities,1 have the ability to unite and that together they can demonstrate the substantial power necessary to engender social change. CONTEXTUALISING THE FESTIVAL The National Community Theatre Festival is a relatively new project, initiated by Yossi Alfi in 1998. Alfi, born to Jewish immigrants from Iraq, and currently a well-known director, actor and poet, was one of the founders of community theatre in Israel. Back in the 1970s he led a radical community theatre that set out to express the feelings of the oppressed Mizrahi ethnic group.2 He later changed his orientation and left community theatre almost completely in favour of other more mainstream theatrical projects.3 In 1998 he was appointed to administer the Givatayim Theatre, a new arts centre in greater TelAviv, where he decided to organise a national community theatre festival. It appears that Alfi, who began his career on the margins and then gained power in the centre, had not forgotten his origins, and eventually used his post also for the benefit of those communities of which he had once been a part. ‘Givatayin theatre’, states Alfi, ‘is an international arts centre that hosts theatre companies and art exhibitions from all over the world, music concerts and also the best theatre productions. The theatre is also located in a very affluent neighborhood, and so it is here, deliberately, that I want the national community theatre festival to take place’ (Alfi 2002). The meagre funding that Alfi manages to obtain from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry for Science, Culture and Sport necessitates a lot of volunteer work, especially by Alfi’s wife Sue, the producer of the festival, and by Levana, Alfi’s secretary,4 as well as by his young daughter, who acts as an usher at the event itself, and several leading community theatre activists – Alfi’s acquaintances, who willingly participate whenever Alfi requests it.5 This ‘family-like’ process of production contributes, on the one hand, to the development of an especially close and bonding atmosphere of communitas, but is also criticised, on the other hand, by those community theatre practitioners who feel that the festival suffers from being a one-man show, and that Alfi should stop acting as the sole authority whose final decisions determine which community theatres are ‘in’ and which are ‘out’. While these critiques, have not yet been translated into action, Alfi

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continues to act as a key figure and produces the Festival even though he is now no longer the administrator of Givatayim Theatre. The festival usually lasts two days, from 4:00 pm on, and takes place in the autumn. Various community performances, workshops and discussions fully occupy all the spaces of the theatre, including the large open foyer, stairs, yard and coffee shop in the front of the building. Each year the festival attempts to focus on a central theme. In 1999 it was Jews and Arabs, in 2000 it was women, in 2001 groups with special needs, and in 2002 it was dedicated to social community theatre in general. Nevertheless, in practice the festival articulates different voices from various places, and creates a colourful, polyphonic image, which truly represents contemporary Israeli community theatre as a multiplex cultural phenomenon. Entrance is free of charge, but (as reflected through the 2002 questionnaire) the audience nevertheless comprises mainly ‘insiders’ with direct connections to community theatre: the performers themselves, their followers, community theatre students and practitioners, community workers, social workers and delegates of the municipality. In 2002 Alfi tried to expand the number of ‘outsiders’ by arranging a grand opening of an art exhibition at the same time as the festival. Although this managed to pack the entrance to the building, the stairs and the lower floor where the paintings had been hung, it did not draw any additional spectators to the performances themselves. It was somewhat strange to watch these visitors physically mingle with the festival audience, while at the same time being totally distanced from them. Nevertheless, I believe that as a subversive tactic Alfi’s idea was at least successful in adding some visual and auditory ‘volume’ to the whole festival event, which determinedly strove to imagine itself as more glamorous than perhaps it really was. Any community theatre wishing to participate in the festival must first send a video cassette of its latest production with some basic information about itself. Selection of the performances is based on the criteria of social relevance of the subject matter and its artistic quality. One or two of the best works receive the privilege of being performed in full, while others are given partial presentations. Usually, a sequence is comprised of three or four pieces from different performances, but with a common denominator. Such a structural system acts both to indicate only ‘the best of’ and as a functional device that draws more groups to the festival. As Alfi notes, ‘it helps

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to fill the auditoriums’ (Alfi 2002). In 2002 two such sequences were performed each day, with full performances and workshops opening and closing each day. The total performances constituted one ‘superperformance’ through a collage composition. The intertwining of the different performance sections created a particular type of theatrical event that is unique to this festival. Each section is removed from its original local context, where it embodied a specific significance for a particular community, and is relocated together with the other chosen sections in a collage that accumulates into a new sign system that bears new meaning and experience. PERFORMING METHODOLOGY AND THEORY My research journey into the meanings and experiences fore-grounded by the Festival is based on the 2002 Festival as a case study. The materials that I analyse consist of my own participant observations, the video of the festival and 70 questionnaires completed by spectators. In establishing my interpretation, I also employ three analytical categories borrowed from the social sciences. The Israeli National Community Theatre Festival6 is basically a public event like any other festival. A public event, as Don Handleman (1990) states, is an occasion that people undertake so as to make more or less of themselves, or to become the ‘other’ in some way. Thus the public event always ‘does’ something, affecting the social order. Handelman distinguishes between a mirroring public event, which presents the lived-in world as it is; a modelling public event, which presents an alternative to the lived-in world; and a representing public event, which offers propositions and counter-propositions about the lived-in world, and raises questions, and perhaps doubts, concerning the dominant social forms. The Festival, according to my reading, constitutes an event that co-communities undertake in order to make more of themselves and thus to confront the dominant social order. The ‘super-performance’ of 2002 offered various moments of mirroring which were transformed by the performative energies into modelling scenes revealing the potential for change and empowerment through theatre at large and community theatre in particular. Public events, especially the aesthetic ones, carry the promise of what Victor Turner (1967; 1982) describes as communitas, a special bond that unites people over and above any formal social bonds. In communitas there are undifferentiated, equal, direct, I /Thou

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or Essential We relationships that are more than just those of casual camaraderie or ordinary social life. In the Festival the fictional worlds represented on stage modelled forms of communitas that infiltrated into the ‘here and now’ of the event, enlarging the circle of communitas by creating a bond between the various groups of communitas that had gathered to participate in it. A community, as Benedict Anderson (1991) suggests, is in fact always an imagined community. In the mind of each of us there is an image of our community. This image is invented, created, but nonetheless influences us as if it were real. Thus, communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Experiences and meanings in the Festival were generated by the tension between the real and the imagined. The Festival was that public event which provided the co-communities with a playground to imagine more of themselves, to imagine themselves as equal, powerful and dominant, and as theatre artists who manage to create relevant and emergent theatre in the centre of Israeli culture and society. This invented image of the Festival bore psychological and political significance not only for the participating co-communities but also for the lived-in world outside, which continually dismisses community theatre as residual theatre. COMMUNICATING EXPERIENCES The Festival opened with a low-intensity piece, in a small hall in the basement, with two clowns playing in pantomime with each other and with the audience. It then became clear that one was a professional medical clown, while the other was actually a practising gynaecologist, who had once long ago graduated from the famous mime school of Jacques Lecoq. After their performance they sat in front of us, with their red noses shill on, and presented their mutual agenda to develop medical clowning in the hospital. They clarified that their performance was but a short demonstration of clown-playing with young patients before and after treatments, and then humorously responded to questions and comments from the audience. What was experienced at first glace as a side-event with little reference to community theatre appeared retroactively as a proto-event that indicated some basic constituents of the Festival. In the performance it was the ‘real’ clown who wore a doctor’s gown over his colourful garments and occasionally held a doctor’s bag, while the ‘real’ doctor

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chose to completely abandon his social status signs, and fully realised his repressed ego. Inside and outside the fictional world they behaved like two real partners, with a special bond, facilitating each other ‘to make more of themselves’. The mute clown became the doctor-clown explaining his funny medical methods and recounting his personal experiences from the hospital. The serious doctor became the clowndoctor revealing his additional artistic skills. We, the audience, who showed from the beginning a high level of participation and attentiveness, ended the event with a simple but humorous chorus of baby voices taught and led by the doctor, which signalled our reception into and enlargement of the clowns’ communitas. Thus, To Smile, the first event in the Festival was a modelling event for alternative approaches to social roles, human relationships, medical treatment and, most of all, to theatre, community and community theatre. The vertical transition from the basement to the upper floor was physical, mental and visual, exposing us stair by stair to bright, noisy and vibrant high-intensity happenings in three different locations. On the plaza, by the main entrance, community theatre students performed The Centre of the Campus in the middle of a square of chairs. This was their own project produced as part of their secondyear curriculum. The original script told the story of different kinds of homelessness as a critical metaphor for Israeli society. It was directed by Igal Azarati, one of the more socially and politically committed directors in Israel, who is himself a graduate of The Community Theatre Unit of Tel-Aviv University, and who currently runs the Hebrew-Arabic Theatre in Jaffa. The students became very disappointed as they felt that their work should not have been removed from its original location in the University, where it was performed in a huge tent and in front of a captive audience. In the Festival, without the tent, other accessories and proper sound, but with a lot of noise from the adjacent coffee shop and the many occasional onlookers strolling in and out the building, their performance got completely lost. From my point of view, the scene illustrated a crucial aspect of the Festival in large: the artistic quality of any particular dramatic performance was not necessarily the most significant generator of the special atmosphere and experience of the ‘superperformance’. The Centre of the Campus for instance, was a politicalaesthetic action that transgressed the usual, indoor, well-defined

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boundaries of the Festival, insinuating that the co-communities might even move on from the plaza into the street; and what was that day only an ‘as if’ representation could become the next day a resistant ‘as is’ presentation. The performance, with all its artistic weaknesses, managed nevertheless to animate the entrance to the building and attracted people from the neighbourhood who otherwise would not have come, creating a unique and unexpected welcome for those who were hurrying into the building in time to catch the full performance in the big hall. But there another surprise awaited them. Not one group appeared to be bothered by the official time table, especially those that were supposed to present only 10-15 minutes of their work, but instead used all kinds of guerilla tactics to farther occupy the stage. Baldness in Live Time by the Theatre Group of the Oncology Ward from Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem was presented as formally planned and noted in the programme, through two short scenes. The first scene opened with a cheerful dance of little girls with plaits and pink baby-doll outfits. They then disappeared and, in total contrast, little girls in grey robes, whitened faces and with shiny plastic covered heads, slowly danced around another little girl in a pink baby-doll outfit with face and head similar to the others. The grey girls then connected themselves to the pink girl by colourful strings. This visual metaphor for the process of the illness was continued in the second act, when the father of the little pink girl sings to her, personifying her baldness: When you will learn to love me you will love yourself also. I may be a baldness in a remote wood, but I am your baldness. […] Don’t forget that I came first when you were born. I am the baldness who loves you more than anybody, so smile, smile, smile.

The begging for a smile then ended with the little pink girl smiling and dancing with the other pink girls. This performance associatively evoked To Smile, the previous performance, creating a continuum that reinforced the therapeutic interpretation of the event and the belief in the healing powers of creating theatre and performing it in public. At the end of Baldness in Live Time, when the next group was about to hurry on stage in order to rearrange it, Erez Meshulam, the director of Baldness ‘captured’ the stage, asking for a few more minutes. The group, as he said, comprised young Jewish and Arabic patients and their families, and as the Arabs from East Jerusalem did not speak

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Hebrew but had come to the Festival with all their friends and relatives, we, the audience should let them too go on and perform their scene. These three words – Arab, sick and children – constituted an irresistible weapon, and so the Arabic group invaded the stage for another 15 minutes. This delayed the next performance and stole some of its glory as a full performance, but it was striking nevertheless. A woman, who was also a social worker, explained in Hebrew with a heavy Arabic accent, that the song we were going to hear had been written and composed by a Syrian artist, who had had ‘the illness’ himself and had been cured. Then a young boy, surrounded by his large family, opened his mouth, and the auditorium was filled with the sound of an amazing voice, singing emotionally in Arabic, causing the entire audience to begin clapping fervently. That was a specially emotional moment, a rare metaphor of the complex Jewish-Arab relationship provided from its somewhat more hopeful side, which only a communitas of co-communities could bring into being. After such a climax, Bitter Chocolate, a performance by The Golden Age Community Theatre from Jaffa C, was received less enthusiastically despite its quite high artistic quality, which was fully deserving of its being performed in entirety. The play, based on reallife materials of the elderly actresses, was edited by Michal Revach, a community theatre playwright, and directed by Hannah VazanaGrinvald, a community theatre director who has recently been working especially with groups of women. In the middle of the stage stood a brown bench with the stump of a tree trunk leaning over it. On the backdrop, the big, brown, abstract painting that had already hung there during the previous performance was still there. Had it been forgotten? Whose stage design was it originally? Somehow it had become suitable for both the performances, as it alluded perhaps to pulled roots, or to some mysterious, scary illness? Creature? On this bench, three old ladies in white gowns were waiting for the Angel of Death, who for some reason was not coming, or perhaps was already there (indicated by the painting)? In the meantime, like Beckett’s characters, they were annoying one another and playing with their memories. Each of the women, the happy one, the snob and the irritable one, represented a different approach to old age, suggesting the happy, optimistic attitude as the beneficial model. While waiting, they exposed us to some of the crucial moments in their lives, depicted in episodes presented alternatively on either side of the stage,

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while the three actresses watched other women from the group acting out their own characters. In addition to the competent directing and the credible acting by the women, this performance also carried a special theatricality through its double witnessing7 by which we watched the three ladies watching the other women who were portraying them. This device not only heightened self-reflexivity among the audience, but also acted as a pointer that crystallised these women’s message for us about the taste of life, which may perhaps not be that of honey, but nonetheless still has the taste of chocolate… After Bitter Chocolate the Festival reached its peak in two collages of performance sections that, because of poor timing, were performed almost simultaneously in the big hall on the upper floor and in the smaller hall on the middle floor. Yossi Alfi opened the first sequence with a greeting to the audience, thanking the mayor and all those people who had voluntarily helped to organise the Festival, and with a complaint about the difficulties of putting it together. He presented the collage as a ‘light tasting’ that should encourage us to go on and watch the full performances in their original locations. Alfi briefly introduced each performance and gave the names of the actors. The four different short demonstrations, according to his hegemonic stand, revealed ‘the beauty of this country because of the differences’. This led me to trace the implied co-communities’ accumulating politics of difference through the creation of the collage. Surviving, by the Women’s Community Theatre from Bat Yam, directed by Meira Medina, depicted the daily life of certain actresses, mainly single mothers who had emigrated from Ethiopia and the former USSR. The play presented the meetings of these women with the social worker, who persistently instructed them on how to become quickly assimilated. As these encounters were presented from the standpoint of the women, we were exposed to those moments of distress that the national, glorious Aliya (immigration to Israel) narrative usually excludes. Lena cannot part from her piano, which she was not allowed to take with her. Her piano, personified by another Russian woman, reminds her of her symbiotic past with it, and also symbolises the mental and cultural anguish of leaving behind such a large part of selfhood, identity and memory. Ziva and Ania demonstrate how difficult it is for two totally different ethnic groups to live in a crowded transit camp, a fact that the Israeli establishment still fails to

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recognise. Eva, apparently, had to pay a high price to emigrate. Leaving behind her gentile husband, she is now fighting to bring over her only son, who is torn between his parents. Her neighbour, a veteran Mizrahi woman, supports her with unceasing and unquestioning devotion, modelling the kind of reception and relationship we should all display toward newcomers. Medina, the director, who adopted a sparse, stylised aesthetics, seated the actresses, all in black, in an open square of chairs, at front stage. Left stage was a pile of brown suitcases, which besides symbolising newcomers also functionally transformed into a wall, a table or a counter as required. The action was positioned in the middle of the square, mainly based on the direct acting of the women. The real social worker of the group also played the fictional social worker, and although she may have done so in order to facilitate the role, it turned out to be a subversive tactic exposing the insensitivity of the Establishment’s ‘good will’ in their approach to newcomers. The social worker, a former Russian immigrant herself, played her role with total identification. In her rough, Russian-accented Hebrew she preached: You see, Israelis are sympathetic neighbours; they are warm and friendly people. If they are sometimes impatient, that can be understood as they have received so many newcomers in recent years. It depends only on you, on how quickly you will assimilate in Israeli society. My suggestion is that you speak only Hebrew, stop babbling Russian or Amharic, speak only Hebrew (becoming ecstatic) Yes, Hebrew only Hebrew, Hebrew! Don’t say it is a difficult language; say it is a beautiful language!!!

Having totally internalised her institutional job, she sounded on stage like the blaring trumpet of the hegemonic voice. Was she aware of the ironic, critical viewpoint of the play? Had she joined forces with her group in order to expose the fallacies of the Welfare policy? Or had she become an active part of the group in order to control and censor it? The second performance, The Past is Dead, was played by an Ethiopian youth community theatre that boldly presented the intergenerational problem from the adolescents’ point of view. For them the past is dead, and they feel totally alienated from their parents’ traditional way of life. Another youth theatre, from a more affluent town, presented a scene from Screens, exposing the troubles of youngsters who outwardly seem to have the perfect life. The sequence

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ended in a humorous scene from In Gerta’s Salon by The Community Theatre of Jaffa D, which parodically portrayed an encounter between a bunch of Ashkenazi (Jews originating from Western countries) hotshots and a shrewd Mizrahi fortune teller. The formation of the different performance sections into a collage resulted in a kaleidoscopic, critical image of Israeli society from ‘the bottom’, an image that would be expanded in the subsequent collages. The uniqueness of the second collage lay in its social arrangement of a group of battered women, a group of battering men and a mixed group. The composition of these three different positions stimulated a more complex sensibility to the problem of domestic violence. Through stylised movements manipulating pieces of iron railing, the women demonstrated the implied violence in every woman’s life course, while the men managed to arouse empathy by proving so ‘normal’, on the one hand, and performing their tormented inner feelings of self-accusation, on the other hand. The ‘eventness’ of the collages was engendered by the various spontaneous, celebratory extra ending to each performance in which family members and friends offered flowers to the actors, or the actors thanked the director, and called him/her up on the stage to embrace. The most striking phenomenon, however, was the physical, circular movement of the theatre groups from the auditorium onto the stage and then back down again to the auditorium. This created a literal/symbolic transformation from spectator to actor and back to spectator, which reached its peak when, at the end of each collage, Alfi invited all the actors of the various performances to come on stage. This phenomenon was also indicated by 95% of the questionnaire’s respondents, who mentioned that this kind of experience was indeed unique to the Festival itself and could not be traced in conventional or even community theatre performances. This process ‘elevated’ the whole event, generating a flow of ‘heightened celebratory consciousness’ (Rinzler & Seitel 1982) that reinforced the euphoric sense that usually accompanies communitas. Moreover, this form of democratic playing culture signalled the empowering abilities of theatre as an event in general and the Festival as a socio-aesthetic event in particular. The second day of the festival repeated the deep structure of the previous day, starting with a low-intensity event, down in the basement, and then building it up with collages in the upper halls. In

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the story-telling workshop conducted by Yossi Alfi and Igal Azarati, Yossi presented his vision that: In the past story telling belonged to the children, today it has passed to the adults. Theatre has changed to a story-theatre. Everybody tells stories and along the way we see this happening. Everybody loves to tell stories, so we have to use it as a chief method in community theatre, help the community to become a story-teller. We don’t need artistic skills so much; something that always bothers us concerning community theatre. What we need as community directors is to cause the whole community to speak, and find the crucial common denominator. These are the roots of communal drama.

He then guided us to spontaneously tell stories and skilfully connected up between the youngsters who were telling about their journeys all over the world, and the adults who were occupied with their own or their relatives’ immigration stories. The implied common theme was indeed the slippery nature of identity, which, by the end of the day, I had realised was what the festival was all about: various cocommunities confronting their socially negated or imposed identity, searching, in turn, for their imagined, more incorporated identity. The core events of the second day were two collages, one presenting two youth companies and the second two mentally disabled groups. The first collage was associatively connected to the youth performances of the previous day, and together they centralized adolescents as a temporary co-community that strives to ascertain its self-identity in confrontation with the adults’ block power. The second collage enabled us to perceive something about life and ourselves from the viewpoint of the mentally disabled, and was one of the Festival’s major socio-aesthetic achievements. In ‘Similar’, a theatre group from a hostel guided by Osnat Raephaeli-Satobi, a community theatre practitioner, the disabled presented us with their independent and communal daily life. The aesthetic scheme, through which the actors personified through pantomime and stylised movements different machines and activities, aroused great applause. The play focused on a young woman with special needs, who unwillingly quits her home because of her mother’s severe illness and enters sheltered housing. The extraordinary patience, tolerance, love and support she gets from the residents eventually changes her resistance to accepting herself, and she happily joins the commune of others like her: You’d better stay with us. We are all friends here; I’ll introduce you to all of them. We have a swimming pool, disco, classes of cooking, painting, Yoga…

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we’ll take you with us. We’ll teach you to use the washing machine and the kitchen. You will never be sad again; you will be with us, your friends. It will be fun, you’ll see. We’ll help you to get used to it. See, we have prepared a party for you, come dance with us (Efrat is surprised but eventually joins the dance).

In To Learn to Live With It, the disabled from a special culture centre, guided and directed by Chaim Tal, further develop their critical gaze at us, and offer a more flexible and less over-protective approach to themselves. It was indeed inspiring to see the creative powers of the disabled, who so persuasively managed to impersonate ‘normal’ and ‘retarded’ characters. Mr and Mrs Osher (happiness), a normal couple, give birth to twin sons, one healthy and the other mentally retarded. A distinguished doctor lectures them on their son’s problem in very sophisticated medical language that they barely understand. We witness the pattern of exclusion this son suffers in each stage of his life, for his own sake and safety, of course, as his mother assures him. This continues until the moment when he finds the courage to bring an end to the over-protection, and goes to live in a hostel with his girlfriend. I’m sick of being at home, I’m so bored! I always fight with you. Damn it, I’m thirty years old and you still tell me what to do. Don’t worry so much, I know how to take care of myself. I’m fed up that so many things my twin brother can do you won’t let me do. Enough of it, I’m going to live in a hostel and you will have to learn to live with it.

The successful acting of both ‘normal’ and ‘not-normal’ characters by those who have been socially defined as retarded reduced the gap we usually posit between these two categories, indicating that it is maybe we who are acting abnormally in being so threatened by people who are not exactly like us. It is not only the mentally disabled, but also we who have to learn to live with it. Tal used a functional staging and casting in accordance with each actor’s abilities, which proved to bear aesthetic results as well. The characters were interesting, humorous and self-reflexive, revealing the power of theatre to confront social stigmas and oppressive mechanisms. The stage design was based on a few big painted cubes that were transformed into a bed, a hospital bed, a garden bench and decorated columns in a function hall. The disabled actors, who had themselves painted these cubes and the placards that were stuck on them according to each scene, were also the stage managers and arranged the set.

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The two performances attempted to posit a society that goes beyond the liberal welfare policy toward the handicapped, and instead generates a more reciprocal interaction with them, which recognises their contribution to our lives. COMMUNICATING MEANINGS Analysis of the 70 questionnaires about the audience and its reception process reveals that 90% of them consisted of the actors, their relatives and friends, community theatre practitioners, social and community workers and community theatre students. The others were theatergoers who had come in response to the flyers posted along the neighbourhood streets and advertisement on the local radio. The two main groups that could be distinguished – ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ – related to the nature of community theatre and the experience of the Festival. Both groups described community theatre in very similar terms: a ‘practice that gives voice to invisible communities’, ‘is based on people of the community’, ‘expresses issues and way of life that are not represented in the dominant culture’, ‘the community actors are natural and sometimes even better than the professionals’. ‘Community theatre is a liberating theatre’, ‘a means for confronting social problems’, ‘facilitates personal expression’, and ‘is a form of protest as well as therapy’. 20% of the ‘insiders’ commented that not all the performances of the Festival were community theatre, and thus it operates as an ostensive pointer to the on-going debate about the definition of community theatre. Both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ articulated their personal experiences in words such as ‘it was fascinating’, ‘interesting’, ‘enjoyable’, ‘authentic’, ‘penetrating’, ‘emotional’ and ‘exciting and touching’. 40% of the ‘insiders’ also said that the Festival ‘empowered them and their choice to work in community theatre’, ‘it was most impressive to meet other groups that had gone through similar personal, group and creative processes’ and ‘I am proud of all the groups and their display in the Festival’. A festival is in fact that institutional performative genre by which the hegemony imposes its power and consolidates its centrality. The Festival was a public event that brought together co-communities that, while following the rules of the game of a festival, produced an experience of power and centrality, and which was transformative, despite its temporary nature; for self and society are generated as they are expressed and every expression is also a change.8 Moreover, the

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unique theatrical energies of the Festival enabled the participants to imagine themselves as powerful, united and prestigious. The Festival modelled the desired passage from local to national, and a reconstruction of the imagined national co-community of community theatres. The Festival thus presented a concentrated example that modelled the power of the powerless, who appropriate cultural institutional practice and use it for their own benefit, signalling that the staging of an alternative reality can always transgress the fiction and ‘restage’ reality itself.

NOTES 1

I suggest here the term ‘co-community’ in parallel with ‘co-culture’ as presented in the field of communication studies by Mark Orbe, in order to replace the negatively loaded more familiar expressions such as 'sub-culture', ‘minority group’, ‘nondominant group’, etc. See Mark Orbe, Constructing Co-Cultural Theory. London, Sage, 1988. 2 See, for example, Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, ‘Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Israeli Community Theatre’, Theatre Research International, Vol. 28, No.2, 2003, pp. 181192. 3 During the 1980s he organised workshops for community theatre directors in various academic venues through ‘Kahal’ (in English ‘Audience’), his own non-profit association. 4 She is the official secretary of ‘Kahal’, and has been faithfully assisting Alfi for many years. 5 I myself was a member in the organisation board of the first festival in 1998 and led discussions at the festivals of 1999 and 2003. As I had chosen to focus this article on the 2002 festival, I refrained from taking any active part. 6 I refer to it hereafter simply as the Festival. 7 On this subject see Freddie Rokem ‘Witnessing Woyzeck: Theatricality and the Empowerment of the Spectator’, Substance, Vol. 31, No. 2 & 3, 2002, pp. 167-183. 8 On this subject see, for example, Edward Bruner (ed.) Text, Play and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society, Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1984.

REFERENCES Alfi, Y. (2002) Interview with the author of this article, 8 August. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined communities, London: Verso, New Left books. Handelman, D.(1990) Models and Mirrors: Toward Anthropology of Public Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Rinzler R.. & Seitel, P. (1982) ‘Preface’ in Victor Turner (ed.) Celebrations: Studies in Festivity and Ritual, Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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Turner, V. & Turner, E. (1982) ‘Religious Celebrations’ in Turner, V. (ed.) Celebrations: Studies in Festivity and Ritual, Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press: 201-219. Turner, V. (1967) The Forest of Symbols. New York: Cornell University Press.

THE VALUES OF A FESTIVAL – THE SWEDISH THEATRE BIENNALE WILLMAR SAUTER

Uppsala was already a significant Swedish town in pre-historic times. As the site of the Swedish kings it was well-known all over Scandinavia, and the three majestic grave hills, each about ten meters high, still stand as witnesses of the ancient glory of the town. In the Middle Ages Uppsala became the residence of the Swedish archbishops and in 1477, the first University of Sweden was founded there. Although Uppsala lost its political significance to nearby Stockholm, it remained the episcopal and academic centre of Sweden for a long time. Historically, theatre was not a well-regarded entertainment in this city of learning. Already in the late 1600s the board of the university complained about the disturbances theatre caused for the students, and in 1759 the Parliament passed a bill prohibiting all theatrical entertainment in cities where universities and high schools were located. In the course of the nineteenth century, these restrictions were circumvented and eventually dissolved. In the last century Uppsala developed into an important industrial city and, while the cathedral and the university still dominated public life, a municipal theatre was created in the 1950s. Today, Uppsala City Theatre is well established on the Swedish theatre map. Thus, it came hardly as a surprise that the 6th Swedish Theatre Biennale took place in Uppsala between 25 May and 1 June 2003. CULTURAL CONTEXT (POLITICS) The driving force behind the planning of the Swedish Theatre Biennale is the Swedish Theatre Union, a professional organisation of employers and employees. Established in 1951, the Theatre Union unites theatres, theatre and dance groups, artists, technicians and educational institutions. Its aim is to promote common issues such as cultural politics and economic problems, taxes and sponsorship, the training of professionals, and also to represent Sweden in Nordic and international associations such as the International Theatre Institute (ITI). At the same time the Theatre Union works for the public

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visibility of the performing arts. Prior to the last general elections in Sweden, the Theatre Union developed a programme to focus on cultural politics as an issue for the campaigns of the political parties. One of the striking arguments against rationalisation in the arts was that it takes as many actors and as many hours to perform A Dream Play now as it did in the times of Strindberg. In this context a festival of Swedish theatre can be understood as a manifestation of the creativity and vitality of theatre in this country. Nevertheless, it took many years of discussion and fundraising before the first Biennale was launched in 1993. Despite its overwhelming success ever since, the Swedish Theatre Biennale has suffered from poor financial backing. The Uppsala Biennale of 2003 had an overall budget of no more than € 280 000, compared to the € 7.5 million spent during the Adelaide Festival in 2002. The Swedish Theatre Union paid about one third of the costs, the municipal authorities of Uppsala contributed another third of the budget and some money was added by the Cultural Council, a state agency. The rest came from the fees paid by the participants themselves (equalling 25% of the total income). It is obvious that the Theatre Union considers the Biennale an important occasion to promote theatre and therefore its board had decided to devote a substantial contribution of its resources – which consist only of the dues paid by its members – to secure this still new tradition. So far, the Biennale has accordingly taken place every two years and for each festival another city was chosen to host the arrangements. Organisationally, there is a close co-operation between the Theatre Union and a local theatre, the latter being responsible for the localities and the presentation of the performances. In this way, even the city theatre in Uppsala contributes to the costs of the festival. Although the theatre is entitled to the box office revenues, it still costs the local organisers the equivalent of a major production.1 Why does a local theatre take upon itself these costs, and why does the city of Uppsala support the festival with generous subsidies? It has been difficult to get satisfactory answers to these questions. Local politicians speak proudly of the fact that their city had been chosen, their high esteem of their own theatre company, of their responsibility towards culture. True as these arguments might be, they also conceal a more political ambition, which has to do with the image of the city in a regional and national perspective. A power play

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is at stake, which will be considered more closely later on. Obviously the Biennale has become a prestigious institution and offers an opportunity even for smaller cities to become a place of interest and reference in the nation’s theatre life. The Biennale is considered important enough to justify a major economic investment, at least as a one-off occasion. In Bourdieu’s terminology, one could speak of securing a place in the cultural field. This certainly also accounts for the city theatre. For it, the public exposure is equally important. In the latter case, attention is attracted from two directions: firstly, the theatre manifests its position towards the local community as being the host of a major theatre gathering in Sweden; secondly, the city theatre exposes exactly this position to all its colleagues – from the national theatres to small companies. Of course there lies prestige in the commission to carry out this biennial meeting of theatrical Sweden. It also sets a lofty task: to succeed, the organisation needs to work flawlessly. For both the city of Uppsala and its city theatre much is at stake: success means an expansion of their cultural position; a failure would be interpreted as incompetence and the consequences could be disastrous. Although these introductory remarks might seem convincing per se, there are obviously further elements to be taken into consideration. Cultural politics are not operating in a vacuum, but are related to other political areas such as the economy, (un)employment, education, social welfare and so on. The political success is at the same time dependent on its effectiveness in relation to the festival as a theatrical event. It has been stated elsewhere (Sauter 2004) that a theatrical event can be described as an interwoven relationship between cultural context, contextual theatricality, theatrical playing and playing culture. Each of these elements is looked upon as an integrated part of the theatrical event and a festival as a whole constitutes a specific kind of theatrical event. In the following, each one of these aspects will be described in relation to the Uppsala Biennale. CONTEXTUAL THEATRICALITY (ORGANISATION) What could the sixth Biennale in Uppsala offer to the 1 400 delegates during four days in May? The first section of the catalogue is devoted to all the performances presented in various scenic spaces. There were 8 productions for regular theatre audiences, 4 plays for children and

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young audiences, and 4 works from the university colleges of acting and mime. All the 16 productions were shown in two performances each, and the total of 32 performances had to be organised in such a way that the ambitious participant could see all productions. Behind the decision to stage these particular productions (except for those from the colleges) stood a jury of 6 theatre critics, chosen by the Theatre Union. The Union also financed their travel expenses, unless these were covered by the newspapers for which the critics write. This group of critics had the ambition that all Swedish theatre productions of the years 2001 and 2002 should be seen by at least one of the jury members. Of course there was a debate as to what extent the critics actually succeeded – there were claims that none of them had visited this or that theatre – but it cannot be denied that they covered a broad field, both geographically and in terms of various genres. Excluded were dance performances – there is a dance festival in intermittent years – and musical theatre, which is prohibitively expensive. Some of the productions that the jury had suggested for inclusion were no longer available at the time of the festival. Either the ensembles were already dissolved, the stage equipment too complicated to be moved, or the theatre in question too poor to cover the costs of their participation. At the same time, none of the invited productions from the Royal Dramatic Theatre appeared in the festival programme and the question was whether the national theatre thought it had enough cultural capital to disregard such a prestigious invitation. It is important to note – and probably significant for a Swedish way of thinking – that the productions of the Biennale are not considered ‘the best ones’, nor is there an element of competition in the festival. The productions are thought of as being interesting, creative work worthy of being seen by professional colleagues. Some might be more innovative in technical or performative terms, others raise contentious issues, and one or another are simply considered ‘superb’ for a particular reason. Although some prizes are awarded during the festival, these are not related to the participating performances. For example, my colleague from the Theatre Department received an award from Assitej – the international association for children’s theatre – for her eminent books and articles in this field.

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While it is true that no competition takes place, the invitation to the Biennale is in itself a sign of professional excellence. The prestige is a specific one: as will be discussed later, the works are almost exclusively performed for professional colleagues. The choice of a production thus means that one’s work is considered interesting enough to be shown to colleagues – future collaborators as well as competitors in the theatrical field – an exposure of considerable status, even among those participants who might not personally like a particular production. Apart from the theatre performances, the festival programme consisted of almost 60 seminars, lectures, debates, workshops and master classes. The theme of the Biennale in Uppsala was ‘Theatre in the Reality’, wide enough to comprise a variety of topics. Anybody who had bought a Biennale pass (for € 100) had access to public discussions, whereas the artistic demonstrations were limited to those who had signed up beforehand. Many of these meetings were arranged by subdivisions of the Theatre Union, such as the associations of actors, technicians, directors, managers, children’s theatre, actors’ training schools and so on. Also a number of academics from outside the theatre sphere were brought in from Uppsala University, speaking about general topics, for example about culture in the information society, historical costumes, or the theatre of hysteria. This very tight programme did not provide breaks for lunch or dinner. Except for the dinner party for all participants during the last evening, everybody had to find the time and a place to eat. One of the few commercial sponsors provided free coffee at any time during the festival. Otherwise, people found their own friends and took the time off whenever they felt they could stay away from a seminar or a performance. This tightness of the programme is also a strong aspect of everybody’s experience of the Biennale. But before the atmosphere of these days will be further explored, a few words about the location of the festival activities. Most of the activities during the Biennale took place within the area of one block. On the one side of it is located the building of the Uppsala City Theatre. In the foyer there was the reception, where programmes and theatre ticket were handed out, and adjacent was a café offering drinks and snacks. Most of the performances were shown on the theatre’s two stages and in the carpenters’ workshop in the basement. In the Green Room, readings of new Swedish plays

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were organised. On the other side of the block, a conference building, called the Atrium, was situated. This complex of large halls and small seminar rooms is owned by the Workers’ Union, a typically Swedish institution of a so-called Folkets Hus (People’s House). This entire building was available for the Biennale’s activities because of the holiday period when it took place.2 Walking around the block from the front of the theatre to the entrance of the Atrium took less than five minutes. The Atrium also included a restaurant and there were other eating places nearby, so that the participants could stay in the vicinity during the entire period. Only some of the smaller productions and children’s plays were presented in locations on the outskirts of town, but buses were ready to transport the visitors to and from these places. PLAYING CULTURE (LOCAL ENVIRONMENT) Although flags and banderols decorated the City Theatre and the Atrium, the Biennale was hardly noticeable to the inhabitants of Uppsala. The 1 400 participants left their hotels in the morning or arrived by train from Stockholm to be swallowed by the festival venues all day long. There were no outdoor performances, parades or other public events that could have involved the local population. Tickets for the performances were available only for some of the major productions and only to the extent of ‘left over’ seats not occupied by the Biennale participants. Only in the local newspaper could Uppsala’s inhabitants read about what was happening in the festival. Uppsala is not a city with a broad entertainment industry. As mentioned above, much of public life is still dominated by the university. Student activities, however, mostly take place in what are basically private clubs, organised by associations of students from various Swedish counties. These so-called ‘Nations’ of students arrange dancing, movies, carnivals, debates and so forth, geared mainly towards their own members and are not normally open to the public. Student life in general is relatively confined and adds only occasionally to the playing culture of the city. Such an open occasion occurs at least once every year on the last day of April, when the students put on their white caps and – running down from the castle hills by the thousands – greet Spring. Male choirs do exist, among them the famous Orfei drängar (Servants of Orpheus), who give concerts all over Sweden and abroad. Music can be heard in the

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cathedral and other churches, in the university’s grand Aula, but the city does not sport a symphony orchestra. A yearly film festival attracts audiences dominated by students. The major music stars visiting Sweden prefer to appear in the large venues of Stockholm, which is only 70 kilometres away from Uppsala. Its close proximity to the Swedish capital is noticeable both in entertainment and work life. Approximately 10 000 people from Uppsala commute to Stockholm every day. Of course, there are sports clubs in Uppsala, but none of these play a dominant role on the national scene, at least not in major spectator sports like football and ice hockey. The basket ball team does rather well, though, but fails to attract big crowds. Church life, including the residence of the Archbishop of Sweden, is prominent in Uppsala, and at times even spectacular. But these are only odd occasions, not even part of the yearly cycle of life. Some museums add to the attraction of the city, especially Carl von Linné’s gardens and the amazing Theatrum Anatomicum from 1667 in the historical part of the university. In other words, the playing culture of Uppsala is rather limited and might have needed an injection such as the Theatre Biennale. The Biennale, however, remained a restricted area with almost no impact on the life of the city. While the public value of the Biennale can hardly be measured in hard currency, there are, however, other values at stake. For the city fathers, it certainly is also a question of demonstrating their power. They prove to their citizens that they are capable of attracting such an important cultural event to their city. Here, the skills and capacities of the political management are displayed to the local community. Such demonstrations occur all over the world: one thinks of cultural events like the festivals of minor cities – Bayreuth, Savonlinna, Glyndebourne for operas, Edinburgh, Avignon, Adelaide for drama, Woodstock, Roskilde for rock music, and so on, which otherwise would be blind spots on cultural or even tourist maps. Without the support from municipal authorities, such festivals would probably not exist. The political management – rightly – claims credit for these enterprises in the same way as other kinds of festivals or political gatherings highlight a particular place or region such as the Olympic Games or the G7 meetings in Davos. In addition, these considerations also touch upon questions of collective identities. Of course, it is problematic to speak about

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collective emotions without having carried out thorough investigations. If one is allowed to speculate about common feelings that arise from festivals such as those mentioned above, it is at least probable that these events trigger reactions in the community. A feeling of pride and satisfaction can be assumed to dominate a majority of citizens of a city, where world-wide festivals are celebrated yearly, and even those who do not bother about gold medals might appreciate the fact that their city is hosting the Olympic Games. I have personally experienced such reactions in Olympic cities,3 and in communities like Bregenz with its festival stage on Lake Constance, the Passion Play in Oberammergau, Rättvik, hosting a yearly Swedish folk music festival, or cities pronounced as Cultural Capitals of Europe.4 Part of the local identity is affected by the emotional environment creating a sense of ‘belonging to’ or ‘being part of’ the cultural sphere, encompassed by regular or once-in-alifetime festivals. Although it is difficult to know what exactly such events mean to the individual citizen, she or he shares the experience of a collective event, even if only touched by it peripherally. The matter of collective identity certainly deserves deeper investigation, both theoretically and practically. The Biennale obviously had a significant impact on the collective identity of the participants. This aspect includes both the participation in the Biennale as such and the particular experiences which the daily programme and the performances provided. THEATRICAL PLAYING (EXPERIENCES) Of all Swedish habits, one remains constant: to stand in line. Whatever people are waiting for – a bus, entering a venue, tickets, a cashier – a disciplined line is formed. Not so in Uppsala. Wherever the participants were queuing up, the lines were disrupted, got stuck and broke down. The reason for that was the constant reunions of people who had not seen each other for a while. Old friends from actingschool days, former colleagues from another theatre, collaborators from earlier productions or personal friends steadily entered the public space, were hugged and kissed, while people forgot what they were queuing up for. Meeting colleagues seemed to be one of the major experiences during the Swedish Theatre Biennale. The social value of this gathering was undoubtedly one of the most visible features of the

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festival. Of course, this socialising function can be described in more detail. The range of meetings stretched from seeing an old friend to being introduced to a person who might prove useful for one’s professional career. The Biennale should, however, not be understood as a market place for possible future engagements. The Swedish theatre arena is too limited to make a necessity out of this possibility: theatre people know or know of each other anyway, so there is no need to take this opportunity to promote one’s market value. There are, on the other side, clear hierarchical patterns. Managing directors meet managing directors, artistic directors form a category for themselves, administrators and technicians are a somehow subdued group, and actors seem to be very aware of their public image. The hierarchy became especially obvious during the dinner banquet of the last evening. Since there was no specific seating order, the segregation according to professional groups and/or regional affiliations became clearly visible. Bourdieu’s idea of the professional field and the ongoing fight for a position in it had rarely been demonstrated so literally as during this banquet. The seminars, lectures and debates followed slightly different patterns. At least two functions could be observed. To a certain extent, these arrangements served educational purposes. Many participants really wanted to learn, be it about theatre history, the latest news from the field or the best arguments in theatre politics. Some theatres financed the participation of their employees within the frame of ‘continuous education’, a term used for individual professional development. Attending seminars and debates could also mean something more: it satisfied not only one’s own interest, but also displayed that interest to others. ‘Being there’, showing that this historical or philosophical issue is important, that one is eager to ask questions in a discussion, or that one has legitimate reasons for engaging in a particular debate, also meant to demonstrate a professional and personal position. One’s identity within the profession is strongly marked by the behaviour during these public events and can be interpreted as an essential outcome for many of the participants. Of course, many of the people wanted to see as many of the performances as they could. There was constant running from one auditorium to the next, since the schedule was tight and ran parallel to the rest of the Biennale programme. Sitting in a dark auditorium

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provided less opportunity to be seen by others, so it can be assumed that the decision to attend this or that performance remained more of a personal matter. Each theatrical experience included, hopefully, some aesthetic value. Since no reception studies were carried out, little can be said about the appreciation of the aesthetic experience, except for the fact that all performances were sold out. It is probably characteristic of a professional gathering like the Biennale that not much is spoken about the performances. Any critical view would be seen as a critique of a colleague, a friend, a potential employer. There were regular breakfast talks about the previous day’s performances, but these were mainly opportunities for the producers and actors to talk about their work and to answer (uncritical) questions. The aesthetic experience is not the only value that arises from the performances. There is also an important informative value involved. The jury had chosen what they thought were the most interesting theatre pieces of the previous two years. Accepting the notion that the Biennale productions represent the forefront of contemporary theatre in the country, it is of course of extreme interest to see what the chosen productions represented: a sample of 8 regular and 4 children’s plays, which were considered to be worth the exposure at this exclusive gathering. In addition, the experience of the festival also offered a comparative measure in relation to one’s own professional work. Are these productions really so much ‘better’ than those we produce in our own theatre? The answers to this question naturally differ substantially, but under no other circumstances could such a confrontation be more effective than during the Biennale. The comparative aspect concerns certainly the quality of the production – and quality is an ambiguous matter – and also the kind of theatre presented: an avant-garde production from a Stockholm theatre group was widely rejected as too ‘strange’, while a presentation of a mime ensemble about two brothers’ adolescent relationship was readily accepted. SOME PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS What were my personal experiences and what can they add to the presentation of the Biennale in Uppsala? As Professor of Theatre Studies, an academic from the University of Stockholm, my position was obviously different from that of most participants. Since I am not involved in the creative production of theatre, my relationship to the

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Biennale might easily be considered marginal. There was certainly a tendency to be observed as an observer. Nevertheless, even I was hugged and kissed by many participants, mostly former students of theatre studies. Some of them I could easily recognise, others had slipped my memory during the many years that had passed, and still others came up to me just to tell me that they had studied theatre at the university long ago. Since most of these old students spoke of theatre studies with great respect, it helped me to feel part of the gathering and even to feel a little proud of my department. My lecture, which I gave in tandem with an old friend and current Director of Strindberg’s Intimate Theatre, dealt with an historic topic. It was called ‘The Art of Acting – before and after Strindberg’ and traced the roots of Psychological Realism, the dominant acting style in twentieth-century Sweden. The lecture attracted a considerable number of listeners and was well received. Other seminars about historical issues were also well attended and there is an obvious desire to learn more about the history of one’s own profession. Of the performances I saw I would like to highlight Malla is shopping, based on a children’s book by Eva Eriksson, and resulting in a most adorable performance for 4- to 6-year-olds. The director Elisabeth Frick had engaged a string quartet to accompany the story presented by Hulda Lind Johannsdottir as Malla and Mona-Lis Hässelbäck as her grandmother. An audience of entirely adult festival participants was completely fascinated by this 20-minute performance about little Malla engaged in her first independent shopping tour, her pride and happiness, and her desperation and endeavour to conquer the obstacles on her way. For me, it was absolutely the most exciting theatre performance during the Biennale; its energy, rhythm, the presence of the actors, the interaction with the musicians, the simple but effective stage design, which also included the audience, culminated in an astounding example of what children’s theatre can accomplish. Sophocles’ Electra, presented by the Uppsala City Theatre, had been transformed by its director Birgitta Englin into a contemporary drama about so-called murders of honour, which had recently occurred in immigrant families in Sweden. Electra is angry, angry with her friends, her family, her neighbourhood. And Alexandra Rapaport acts out Electra’s anger in a performance full of attack.

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Actors of non-Swedish origin are engaged in this production, which is very rare on the Swedish stage, and this gives the environment on stage a certain authenticity. However, the depiction of the immigrant family, especially their male members, became, in my opinion, very stereotypical. Do these clichés advance the audience’s understanding of the terrible murders within such families? I had a similarly problematic experience of David Edgar’s play about Albert Speer, in the staging of the Gothenburg City theatre. While the first part deals with Speer’s career during the Third Reich, the second part portrays him in prison and during the period that followed his release. From the historical-political level the play moves to Speer’s personal survival strategies and his psychological dilemma. If only Speer could regret his involvement with the Nazis, he could die in peace – that is how I see the end of the performance. The Biennale programme did not offer any opportunity where such doubts about the productions could be raised. The only chance was to bring it up during the final discussion with the jury that had chosen the productions. My question was if the jury had consciously presented productions of ‘dubious’ ideological nature. My question triggered a number of speeches, both for and against the discussion of such matters. Eventually, it was suggested that future biennales should provide opportunities for thorough discussions of the performances, with analytical introductions by either academics or those foreign critics who had been invited to the festival. All in all, the Biennale was an intensive and exhausting experience. During four days I saw 7 performances and attended 12 seminars, participated in the banquet and the award ceremony following it. It was clear that the density of the programme, the limitation to a few days and the stability of the participation – the same people every day – created a very tight, productive and creative atmosphere. Nevertheless, it was obvious both from my own experience and from my observations that there are many levels of spectatorship due to continuous shifts of attention and contexts. A number of degrees of involvement can be distinguished. Those participants, who were formally exposed to the attention of others, be it as actors, lecturers, organisers or in their capacity of already wellknown personalities, were highly integrated members of the Biennale. Among those who came to see and listen, various degrees of activity could be registered, from intervening in debates to sitting silently in

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the back row. Outside the auditorium, the same people could again demonstrate very different behaviour. Participants who never expressed their views in the formal sessions could very well become dominating in social gatherings. Last but not least, there was an anonymous audience of citizens who were able to get a ticket for a performance, after which they silently vanished into the streets of Uppsala. While these distinctions of involvement reflect the spectator’s view, it should be noticed that the spectators themselves always risked becoming the ‘performers’ for other spectators. The transformation from participant to spectator to performer and back again is probably characteristic of festivals and maybe for any social gathering of that type. The shifts between being agent in one situation and onlooker in the next follow each other tightly in an environment which provokes and enhances human interaction. Festivals with a tight programme certainly produce a feeling of flow in the sense of Mihalý Czíkcentmihály, that is, a heightened state of awareness and involvement during a certain period of time (Csíkczentmihályi 1988). At the same time, the Biennale tended to become a closed, rather selfreferential festival for a specific group of participants, effectively excluding the world outside the profession. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS The description of the Swedish Theatre Biennale in terms of its environment, politics and organisation has been a relatively simple task. Despite omissions and repetitions, the reader should gain a fairly accurate insight into this festival. The problematic aspect of the presentation arises between the elements, which so far have been used as headings to describe the theatrical event. Something important seems to emanate from the relationship between the playing culture and the cultural context of the city, between the organisational framework of the contextual theatricality and the experience of theatrical playing, and so forth. What I am referring to are the different values mentioned above which, rather than being inherent in the basic aspects of the theatrical event – politics, management, performances and environment – are located in the relationship between them.

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Expanded model of the Theatrical Event

Using terms like prestige, power or collective identities marks one group of such values, but these are not easily identified within the cultural context itself. Prestige and identities are not the outcome of political decisions, but need confirmation from the field of cultural playing, on the one hand, and from the management of the festival, described as contextual theatricality, on the other. A symbiosis seems to be established between the greater visions of the politicians and the immediate needs of the organisers. The means of this symbiosis is money, but the outcome is not an economic profit, but rather those virtual values such as prestige and identity. While the organisers use money to produce the festival, they also enhance their own prestige, in part with the politicians, who provided the money, but more importantly, towards the playing culture. The particular part of playing culture, at which the organisers aim, is the field of theatre in which they promote their position. The programming provides the structure for the individual and collective experiences of the participants. They are all engaged in the theatrical playing, performing their own multiple identities as performers and spectators, as lecturers and listeners, as individuals and as participants in various gatherings. The values of these performed identities point to the direction of the Biennale’s own playing culture, creating a sense of community and participation.

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These shared experiences are at the same time a manifestation of the position that the theatrical field holds in the greater area of playing culture. Moreover, there are other values that relate the Biennale experience to the organisational structure of the contextual theatricality. Both aesthetic and educational values are realised as an investment in the future integration of theatrical life in Sweden, be it as career enhancement or as confirmation of an already established position. Again, these values are not inscribed in one particular element of the theatrical event alone, but emanate from the links between such aspects. I have pointed out a number of values such as aesthetics and education, along with a sense of community, professional identities, demonstrations of power and prestige, informative and comparative functions, and, above all, the wide range of socialising. I do not think that a hierarchy of values would be meaningful. Each individual certainly appreciates different values and the awareness of them might differ over time, both during and after the festival. It is more important to state that all these values are actually there. Does this make a festival different from the experience of a regular theatrical performance? Not in principle, according to my view. Even an ordinary evening in a theatre might offer all of these values. Probably the difference is only one of degree. The extent to which we consciously register the variety of valuable experiences is certainly more intense during an extraordinary performance – a first night, a guest appearance – reminding us more vividly of the social, professional and aesthetic significance of the event. During a festival the density and temporal extension of the event heightens the awareness and displays the multitude of the experienced values. That state of mind is most likely the key feature of festival culture, even seen from a global perspective.

NOTES 1

According to the managing director of Uppsala City theatre, Stefan Böhm. The days between the Thursday of Ascension Day and the following Sunday are not working days for most Swedes. 3 The ones I have some experience of are Los Angeles, Sydney and Beijing. 4 Glasgow, Copenhagen and Stockholm are some of which I have experienced or read about myself. 2

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REFERENCES Csíkczentmihályi, M. (1988) Optimal Experience. Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness, Cambridge: Cambridge UP Sauter, Willmar. (2004), ‘Introducing the Theatrical Event.’, in Vicki Ann Cremona, Peter Eversmann, Hans van Maanen, Willmar Sauter and John Tulloch (eds) Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Publishers, pp. 3-14.

PART FOUR FESTIVAL CULTURE AS THEATRICAL EVENTS

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BURNING MAN: FESTIVAL CULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES – FESTIVAL CULTURE IN A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE WENDY CLUPPER

In the United States there are many festivals both regional and national; however, no larger or more socially theatrical contemporary countercultural festival exists than Burning Man. Now twenty years old, Burning Man has over time grown from a festival into a populist movement and a countercultural event that inspires performing. Participants journey to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to escape reality, to gather and mingle in the hot, dusty environment, and to play with interactive art they help to create. Interactivity at the Festival also encourages year-round communitymaking based on social networks of ordinary people coming together in the spirit of the Festival. This essay will critically analyse the festival experience of such participants and the emergence of what may be considered the performance culture of Burning Man. Held just prior to Labour Day in the last week of the summer, the Festival is located in a remote part of the United States on a prehistoric lake-bed called a ‘playa’. Throughout the week the Festival is held participants arrive daily and the festival space develops organically. Configured into a crescent-shaped pattern divided by unpaved streets, the Festival becomes a makeshift city full of camps with recreation vehicles, tents and shade structures at whose epicentre is a forty-foot-tall wooden man. This Man is the effigy which will be burned on one of the last nights of the Festival in a spectacular convergence of fire and performance created by the multitude of celebrating participants. Gate totals for the event currently reach nearly forty thousand people who go there to build camps, celebrate self-expression and wear flamboyant costumes or go nude, all in an effort to create this temporary experimental community. Removed from the familiar trappings of the commercial American landscape where one perpetually occupies the role of consumer, participants come to this commerce-free festival to live, show off, build art, revel, perform and live communally. Burning Man is a non-commercial festival that is structured to give its attendees a space to perform

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themselves where they may be totally occupied with creative survival, interactive art-making, spontaneous discourse and socially playful self-representation. The history of the Festival begins in 1986, in San Francisco, California, on a place called Baker Beach. Two friends, Larry Harvey and Jerry James, decided to ritually celebrate the summer solstice with each of their sons and a few acquaintances, and to build an eight-foottall wooden man to burn there. Twenty people attended that summer, spontaneously communing together around the burning figure and even more showed up the next year. When in 1990 the now yearly burn attracted hundreds of onlookers, as well as the disapproval of the local police, the men moved their new annual event to the Black Rock Desert. In these early years the organisers leased the land for the event for a relatively small amount of money; two decades later the lease from the United States Bureau of Land Management costs them over seven hundred thousand dollars. In the early 1990s the Festival was attended by friends of the organisers, members of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, who practiced urban anarchic street theatre actions, and those people who attended after having heard of the event by word of mouth. Today still the Burning Man Project does not employ commercial advertising, but depends on participant loyalty and friendly media to attract attendees. The group that manages Burning Man calls itself a Project rather than an organisation purposely in order to de-emphasize the group’s institutional framework and instead to focus on the creation of the Festival as the work of unique individuals committed to a common goal. The Project itself may therefore be regarded as a collaborative performance, as well as an exercise in self-expression. This sentiment is significant to the spirit of the Festival which supports communal effort on both the administrative and participant levels. Although demographic statistics for Burning Man are traditionally not kept, in 2001, 2003, 2004 and in 2005 a census was conducted at the Festival representing a 40% sampling of the participant population. The on-site survey was further augmented by an Internet questionnaire. From these figures published online at the Festival website (www.burningman.com), it can be suggested that a strong majority of attendees are residents of the west coast (specifically San Francisco, California), are Caucasian and in age range from their twenties to their forties. And while the socio-cultural

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background of participants in general cannot be more accurately known, what may be explored here is the meaning and possibility inherent in the participants’ experience as cultural performers at the Festival responding to their own temporary escape from and subversion of the dominant normative culture in the United States. To emphasise this point, in the book, This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground, author Brian Doherty suggests: People attend Burning Man for as many reasons as there are individuals. […] But uniting every divergent tendency, spirituality, and attitude at Burning Man is a sense that everyday life is missing something: a spark of creativity, a chance for self-expression, some freedom from judgment and cold personal relations that one must travel far off the grid to find. Burning Man provides a particularly intense arena in which to play out twenty-first century America’s struggle for meaning and community. (Doherty 2004: 10, 11)

The link between participation as placed in the context of struggle for self-identity separate from economics, as well as a cultural critique that recognises alienation as a by-product of one’s involvement in the capitalist system, and a longing for intense and symbolic expression removed from that system is crucial to this analysis. The festival experience for participants has revolutionary potential when identity is temporarily constructed in a new cultural setting that disregards wealth. As more people have had the participant experience and the Festival and the Project have evolved, the culture of Burning Man has grown in size and maturity, and the major tenets of the Festival have developed. These guiding principles represent inherently the potential for liberation Mikhail Bakhtin theorized as accessible to people through the carnival experience. It is encouraged at Burning Man for participants through the cultural values the Project emphasises: radical inclusion, radical self-expression, radical self-reliance, decommodification, gift exchange and communal effort. As guiding principles for participants to Burning Man, they support and legitimise a long-term carnival environment providing spatial immediacy for celebration and personal incentives for participation. As the traditions in the performance culture of the Festival have developed they now help define the experience for many Festival participants: journeying to the desert, building an interactive theme camp, adopting a playa name or nickname, wearing a costume or going nude, and embracing the opportunity of being immersed in a cultural moment as an active

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performer rather than as a passive consumer. The cultural term which has emerged for one who really embraces the experience of Burning Man and also frequently attends the Festival is a ‘burner’. Burners are true citizen artists concerned with their own cultural awareness. For burners, the festival space has become an open gallery within which any art project may be freely exhibited and a stage for communities has been made for bringing participants together. As a festival, Burning Man inspires this community-making both on site and off, as it has established its culture beyond the immediate theatrical experience through regional and on-line communities, thus creating a collective identity. Likewise, as a populist movement, made up of burner communities, participants are culturally significant as artist collectives because they represent through their flamboyance, exhibitionism and transgressions, a new social category for cultural performativity. This category mixes hybrid theatrical styles including fire and movement, interactive street and guerrilla theatre tactics, and the overt and expressive politics of performance. Burning Man isolates its attendees from the normative industrial culture and economics of the United States, in an effort to coax the performer out of the participant and to disrupt the normal self now helping to embody the theatrical nature of this desert festival. THE FESTIVAL CONTEXT Imagine a city populated solely by artists. An area of land occupied by hundreds of communities made up of thousands of people who are generally dressed in costume, interacting with others performatively and doing so amidst large-scale art installations, many of which are on fire. A place that exists for one week, once a year, in the desert and where the temporary residents are uniquely theatrical and utterly committed to the spirit of their city as a place for performing. This is a festival environment that is intentionally non-commercial and unlike the society that contextualises it, interactivity amongst its citizens is the highest form of entertainment and interpersonal spontaneous selfexpression is performance. In the chapter ‘The Festival is a Theatrical Event’, in the book Theatrical Events: Borders Dynamics Frames, authors Jacqueline Martin, Georgia Seffrin and Rod Wissler suggest a model for critical analysis that represents the construction of the festival as a theatrical event. This model considers the remote and immediate circumstances

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This is the Man burning at Burning Man in 2005. Made of wood, metal and neon, the Man stands on a wooden platform that doubles as a site for interactive performance and art. Photo by the author.

and contexts which affect the production of meaning inherent in the performance-audience communication during a festival and informs an understanding of the ways in which meanings are constructed by participants. I am using this model in order to consider participation in the festival setting as performance and to explore how this experience is potentially transformative. According to the authors, in 1999 Hans van Maanen and the members of the International Federation for Theatre Research’s Theatrical Events Working Group created a schema for understanding the three levels of context surrounding a festival. This schema helps ground my own understanding of how Festival participants are able to establish a deeper meaning for the identities they construct in the

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Burning Man experience and the unseen but significant forces affecting their participation and potential transformation into cultural performers. The schema design resembles a core circle that denotes the festival experience surrounded by three separate rings representing three contexts of the festival. In the centre of the three contextual rings of the theatrical event is the festival itself. Temporary liberation inside of the Burning Man Festival exists in its own time/space realm, where the performance communicates outwardly and the participants communicate together at once. The three rings of context that exist surrounding the festival as a theatrical event convey how the individual’s social reality and social self influence their identity-making as performers in this cultural moment. They are: the background experience of the participants that informs their understanding of the festival, the background of the participants as social beings in the outside world and, finally, the outside world itself. One’s experience as a participant in this festival structure is thus multi-layered and may be understood as shaped by how one envisions one’s reality both in and outside of the festival. At the centre of the schema is the Burning Man Festival, all of the participants and the ritual symbol of the Man. The Festival provides the space where the participant and the Man coexist. This relationship symbolises the event as interactive through its communal performative fire ritual bringing participants together. The Man’s power as an image is one that is annually reborn and burned before participants. Its meaning transcends time and encompasses the space of its ritual performance. At the Festival the Man’s presence remains consistent as a focal point for the event space, as a gathering spot for interactivity of participants and it is the image upon which burners may project their desire for connectivity. The overwhelming sense of centrality created by the Man’s placement and the ritual that surrounds the figure are important to consider here as unifying and theatrical. The Project, however, officially refuses to interpret the Man’s symbolic meaning in order that the Man as an unencumbered signifier thus becomes potentially a focus and connector of all meanings. At Burning Man connection between participants is promoted and social interactions are acknowledged as the desire for recognition of each participant’s inner self. The immediacy of, and performances created from, such interactions can be meaningful in a variety of ways. Often the spirit of cooperation encouraged by burners them-

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selves or else competitive situations brought on by the pressures that one removed from one’s normal routine might naturally feel, are exhibited openly in the living spaces at the Festival site. But as the interactive core of the Festival, the communal living spaces known as ‘theme camps’ are the intended public venues that provide a site for participants to collect and intermingle, to perform or play out their experience. Theme camps are occupied by a tribe of participants who collectively create and then perform under a chosen identificatory theme. Theme camps adhere to a Project requirement that they be accessible to all participants and, like the art exhibited at the Festival, are meant to crystallise the interconnections between the Festival and those who attend. Immediately surrounding the sphere of the Festival is the first ring which contextualises the event. Here the ‘perception schemes and strategies’ that participants know outside of the event and respond to affect how they interpret others’ performing and how they will respond. This first circle represents the lived reality of the participant away from the Festival and may determine how inhibited one will be through the process of becoming a cultural performer or an artist. An attendee’s knowledge of the Festival, its community and culture would in this context aid their experience as a participant. A better understanding of the Festival’s tenets regarding civic responsibility in the Festival space is particularly crucial for a participant to be able to negotiate the social terrain present there. The burner ethos is one that is arguably sensitive to issues of respect for others and the environment on the playa. Often, attendees who publicly exhibit perceived disrespect for another person or who, for instance, litter on the ground, will be admonished by fellow participants. Likewise, as radical self-expression distinguishes individuals within the Festival space, participants dressed ‘normally’ will often be approached by others with a clever but serious costume suggestion. The second ring of contextualisation for participants to the Burning Man Festival is their background experiences as individuals that have shaped them as cultural beings in normative society. It is in this ring of contextualisation where participants have been moulded as social creatures and the place from where they take their cues about how to perform publicly. This context does not include the participant’s sensibilities as related to theatrical conventions or aesthetics, but relates to their own socio-cultural profile: age, gender,

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class, education. This contextualisation represents the roots for identity dictated by normative society. Burning Man cannot erase these characterisations of self, but make them purposely more creatively distinct or else distant. In this sense, and as a kind of contemporary heterotopia in the Foucauldian sense, Burning Man is a both real and imaginary place that by its nature temporarily changes participants’ functioning as social beings. They come to work and to play together, not for money but seemingly for the creation and maintenance of their own cultural community. The Festival allows diverse groupings of people to convene under the umbrella of celebratory festival and yet each willing participant may stand out as a social performer removed from the social role they occupy outside of the cultural community. Foucault’s notion of a heterotopia further fits the model of Burning Man as existing within a multilayered context. It is the other place characterised by the time in which it exists, as an indeterminate realm removed from an advanced technological and industrial society. Finally, the third ring of contextualisation for festival participants at Burning Man is normative society. This is the dominant culture of politics, economics and ideology that shape one’s understandings and represents one’s fuller outlying social context. Guy Debord’s concept of ‘the society of the spectacle’ is reflected in this context and resembles the vision of American culture that Burning Man is rejecting. The ‘spectacle’ is the illusion of reality that normal culture is fed through the media, and the consumerism that alienates people from one another. Burning Man represents an acknowledgement of that interpretation and an active stance against staid and unfulfilling cultural experiences. The Festival culture embodies a countercultural community of artists purposefully retreating from dominant society to a vibrant self-created city, where radical self-expression occurs as a form of performance and interaction encourages the citizen artist’s role as burner. THE FESTIVAL PARTICIPANT AS PERFORMER The concept of performance at Burning Man is a unique and important one to explore in the context of the event itself. The standard rules of decorum, the customary definitions of art and performance, and the ordinary social roles people play outside of the event must all be reconsidered and new identities brought to life in this harsh and

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vibrant festival setting. Further, it is an experience that completely involves many participants who must learn to survive away from commercial society, where their behaviour as consumers shapes their social identity, whereas the identity of the participant outside of the context that is Burning Man stands in direct opposition to the citizen artist that the event encourages them to perform at the Festival. By rejecting the outside and imposing societal spectacle, as well as the commercial arts establishment as a kind of corrupt, arbitrary judge, artists as participants themselves become citizens of a new radical community at Burning Man –some who create year-round to again return there. Away from the Festival, they plan logistically and build art, and once living at the Festival they may rarely retreat to a place that is not performative. Burning Man, because of the intentions of its participants as live artists, has then become a critical site for creating identity amongst its attendees as social performers. Both at the event and in the outside world, burners are said to live to return ‘home’, that is, the playa. Home means the metaphorical place where they belong, can be themselves and others will accept their identity. For it is on the playa that participants may ritually strip off their imposed and weighty social role for a self-chosen one. Together burners contribute in both small and magnificent ways to a positive collective energy present at the event. By their presence and on many levels, the burners are always demonstrating a kind of experimental performance: life as art and survival as collaborative creative activity. Theirs is a culture that thrives on a very well planned infrastructure and city plan. Burning Man founder, Larry Harvey, has said that, as an organised society, its chief tool is art; it is also an event that grows organically as a countercultural phenomenon which teaches participants as members of society to notice and value art. The event has been able to do so bolstered by burner presence as volunteers, which demonstrates their respect and reverence for the land, the city and other burners. It is because of them, Burning Man has developed a reputation as a place where people transcend their normal social roles and engage deeply with art. What sets Burning Man apart as a cultural phenomenon is its focus on participation in creating art for art’s sake away from commercialism, its communal artist-friendly collaborative environment, and the responsibility the Project places on attendees to

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This is a stationary performance installation at Burning Man in 2005. The concept is that any transient participant may stand behind the kiosk and give improvised advice to other passing participants. This is a wonderful example of the opportunities which abound at Burning Man for informal performativity. Photo by the author.

entertain themselves. Participants experience the event and respond to the structure of the venue that encourages spontaneous interactive performativity. Populist art and the kind of conceptual art created at Burning Man convenes the society around itself. This goes far beyond simple exhibition, because attendees include thousands who do not make art but come for the chance to experience art or to commune with art-makers. For artists, Burning Man gives them the opportunity to meet and work collaboratively with hundreds of other creators on many interesting and new levels. But for the average participant not making art, the ordinary is suspended at the Festival as each symbolic activity takes on the heightened meaning of art and where participants become burners when they commit themselves to giving something back to the community. This gifting is considered an expression of true self. Importantly, the burner experience as I am theorising it involves a six-stage process that an individual may go through on their journey from spectator to participant. Burners start out by being introduced to

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the Festival’s unique concept of play in a constructed and heightened theatrical zone. This sort of playing involves immediacy and the loosening of inhibitions. By having the experience outside of their normal realm of acting, the strategic gregariousness employed by participants opens them to a possible truth about themselves as social beings. Connectivity between participants is not based on economics, but the desire for recognition and inclusion. The motivation going into this process may for some spectators be that yearning or simple curiosity, but in as much as the environment for the event serves as a filter against those looking for simple escape, the more likely impetus is their longing to be challenged into new ways of being inside of this rather intense festival experience. It can be an emotional, expressive period of time when permissiveness is built into the festival structure as an effective means of guiding participants towards a cultural encounter with others that is significant and values interpersonal relations as having cultural worth. The burner process, if it can be theorised as transformative, begins with a participant discovering the Festival and from there being, 1) enticed to attend, 2) initiated as a participant, 3) engaged in the festival space, 4) moved emotionally by events and/or people in their festival experience, 5) inspired to new ways of thinking about themselves, others or the world in general, and finally, 6) transformed in a personal way that might be either permanent or temporary. Transformation is not necessarily a guaranteed outcome of participation at the Festival, but one that may be achieved via interactivity and interconnectedness. Personal investment in the Burning Man community is demonstrated by one’s active involvement. Through participation, burners are self-invented and by their presence feed the community’s desire for radical inclusivity that further justifies the collective concept of their new cultural identity. Those who attend Burning Man and who undergo this transformative process may be considered performers through their participation, because they break temporarily from a dependence on the usual means of self-authoring and expression. And since commercial trade is not encouraged inside of the Festival venue and as a culture which promotes a gift economy, the value of art and the process of artmaking for burners are transformed into the means by which participants may then come together.

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The transformative process at Burning Man occurs because attendees are welcomed into the collective authorship that happens away from the Festival as a portion of participants maintain community through their active involvement in Burning Man-related events year-round. The tension that exists between identities for those who participate at the event as artists and outside of a commercially established community is threatened only when participants re-emerge into a society that restricts such free expression as nudity, fire performance and loose or boundary-breaking art making. As the festival culture blurs the boundaries between art and life, its participants emerge from their immersion having transcended everyday life as live art collaboratively. In this sense, the Festival provides a theoretical space for Turner’s concept of communitas as it allows participants to connect for a common goal in an invented cityspace where, as citizen artists, the opportunity exists to perform themselves outside of commercial culture, having dropped their usual social roles. As members of a temporary city, the Festival’s participants create their own conceptual nation which represents their perception that they are a part of this community at large. In addition, the role of interactive artwork is importantly one that helps support cultural development at the Festival. High levels of community-based collaboration form a significant counterpoint to more spontaneous types of individual performance as well, and may best highlight communication amongst groups of artists and participants within the Festival community. Such artworks serve to stimulate both social interaction and performance. In 2005 Colossus by Zachary Coffin was a rotating suspension rock-art piece that participants could gather around and people could climb. That year the Man himself, designed by Rod Garrett, included a base three storeys high that made up a large fun house which participants could walk through with turnstiles they could push that would cause the Man to rotate on an axis. Artist David Best’s Temple of Dreams, an impressive wooden temple that participants could walk through and leave votives behind at, was also created in 2005. All of these projects and the many more made there each year invite public participation as part of the performative culmination of the Project work. Interactivity is one of the chief criteria the Project uses when awarding art grants. Participants come to the Festival in order to know this kind of art and to know themselves through the interactive experience.

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Performance for them and as a mode of self-expression occurs at Burning Man in both formal and informal ways. There are planned and scheduled performances for which the players have brought with them a stage, lighting, costumes, props and even sound systems. Some performances are based on play texts and independent scripts. In 2005 the Cockroach Theatre Camp performed a Richard Foreman play and The Lost Penguin Café Camp performed the participant-written ensemble piece, Burning Man: The Musical. But informally there are also opportunities for immediate and spontaneous performance when one volunteers to play conversationally, physically or is wrapped up in the moment of a group performance as a transient audience member. For such transient participant audiences, Burning Man spatially provides three important dimensions distinguishing the Festival as a place where there are essentially performative outcomes. The first is a colourful and structured city space where money has no value, and where attendees can explore and discover performance. The second is a heightened theatrical zone with individuals who volunteer to play and interact with others, as one may be so inclined to do in a carnivalesque setting. And the third is a consistently flowing transient audience to always provide new players and participants for one to interact with on any occasion, for any reason – and all of it outside of the commodified realm. Structured performances may then also be seen as participatory ritual where participants volunteer regularly: for example, the ‘Greeters’ who invite participants into the Festival at the Greeter Station; the ‘Lamplighters,’ who each evening light the city space street by street in solemn procession; and finally, the ‘Critical Tits’ bike ride, based on San Francisco’s Critical Mass bike ride, where at the Festival female participants ride topless united in procession. These activities are all expressions of a collective identity arrived at through the medium of collaborative effort that happens at the Festival. At Burning Man the entire event space, full with tents and domes, pathways and participant-built wooden stages, is something akin to the street or marketplace during carnival time. Distinguishing the Festival as a temporary liberation from the usual order, participants to Burning Man enter a space where interactivity is valued as art and immediate expressive communication is viewed as performance. Participants freely acknowledge one another, while casually travelling throughout the performance space. Activities are

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scheduled during the Festival, are published and distributed by the Project as a schedule of events creatively entitled the What Where When. These activities and performances are hosted by theme camps who, for the most part, invite everyone to come. There are, for example: parties, proms, mixers, parades, dances contests, processions, yoga sessions, fight clubs and better sex technique demonstrations, all of which constitute the participatory democracy that exists in this festival culture. Imaginary meanings make a group of tents with a name into a theme camp (for instance: Happycamp, The Barbie Death Camp & Wine Bistro, Camp Ninja Burger, Clan Destino and Crazy Dante’s Used Soul Emporium – to name a few). There, a table with a water jug becomes a kitchen and a pan of shared risotto is a feast. There, a port-o-potty is a bathroom, and a large packing crate is a stage where one can simulate horseback riding astride a stranger in front of a crowd. Theatrical creativity thus provides a presence for the artist in this alternate society with its own rules, and the culture it produces provides a home for various levels of performativity. Theoretical definitions for performativity equate self-representation as performance and blur the qualities of performing onstage with practices in ordinary life. Burning Man is separate from normal everyday living and yet a kind of staged reality. It is a festival that is celebratory in nature and in its interactive rituals provides liminoidal spaces.1 Turner defines liminoid as voluntary transitional phases, in comparison to liminal phases that are involuntary rites of passage. As an event with spaces for liminoidal transformation, Burning Man gives participants permission to embellish their own aesthetic style and, importantly, strip off their social markings in favour of new personally created ones. Therefore, participants may come to transcend themselves through the lived festival experience as a performer. There is a great deal of power in this performing. Within their culture, burners may reveal themselves fully as social performers without the fear of ostracism. Social stigma at Burning Man is not linked to ostentation, as in the dominant culture, but rather to overt passivity. THE FESTIVAL AS PERFORMANCE CULTURE Dramatic with its fire displays, spectacular in its vast scope physically as a colourful makeshift city, and radically theatrical in its effects on

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participants, Burning Man is the response to Baz Kershaw’s contemporary performative society in action as it invites the entire community to participate, while critically reflecting on the social order from which it allows escape. Two hours from the nearest city, the festival space is a wide-open range and becomes transformed from barren landscape into vibrant city, providing communal areas where participant interactivity is consciously encouraged (such as bars, lounges and air-conditioned domes). For the duration of the Festival, participants are cut off from their normal routine and, having made a pilgrimage to the desert, are captive and enveloped into the larger community. By their annual journey, burners are reminiscent of the history of American utopian communities of the past, as well as the postmodern heterotopic response to an emerging performative society, at whose heart is the person, the subject, of the neo-liberal spectacle that is this ephemeral communal experiment. Further, the inversion of the usual social order occurs when participants replace tribal living for capitalistic class order and behavioural abandon for decorum and selfrepression. As a part of the participatory process of the Festival, the environment there invites frivolity, sexual liberation and humour as social commentary. The release from one’s normal social roles as a means for costuming oneself in the guise of burner importantly allows the participant entry into the cultural community at large. Finally, as an important aspect of the ritual renewal that happens yearly for Festival participants, the event theme is changed by Project organisers to provide fresh new linkages. In 2005 the theme at the Festival was ‘Psyche: The Conscious, the Subconscious and the Unconscious’ and the year before it was the ‘Vault of Heaven’. Visual artists often practise their own creative radical free-expression by incorporating the annual theme into their installations on the playa. This is their opportunity to escape from normative societal expectations and the confinement of the commercial arts establishment. For all participants, though, the power of a radically new and different perspective is what draws them as attendees who then develop a desire for community, alternative culture and relationships not defined by one’s familiar professional and economic status. As a festival, the basic ritual patterns are firmly in place to guide participants into this new way of experiencing culture as performers outside of the usual order. ‘Virgins’, or first-time

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attendees, are initiated through creative interaction with the Greeters and sent on the procession that takes one from the entrance gate on their first day to the space where they will camp and live. There is the fire circle at the Man Burn on day six, where they will congregate with others in the chaos and revelry. There are performances daily which attract people to one another and engage them theatrically in the small self-created spectacles of the culture. There is feasting and the sharing of food and drink between participants in celebration. There is playing that takes the form of games, parades, contests and pageants for all to join in. And most central to this festival experience are the costuming, singing, dancing, conversing and speech making each participant is encouraged to engage in theatrically throughout the week. As another example of how performance at Burning Man transcends the relatively narrow category of art, volunteers are encouraged to interpret public service as a form of performance, thus effacing the distinction between work and play. Sub-groups of volunteers are allowed to creatively fashion their appointed tasks into forms of performance. The elaboration of performance at the ‘Greeter Station’ where participants enter the Festival, for example, was initiated by the Greeters themselves. At Burning Man, volunteerism is literally understood as a civic duty, as is the responsibility one has to one’s tribe as a member of a theme camp. The communal and political dynamics between participants of theme camps is a further extension of the sort of participatory experience one will likely have at the Festival. Individual art-making and performativity each point to issues of authorship and self-reflexivity amongst those who participate in creating theme camps, as well as the voluntary activities central to one’s festival existence. Engagement and the performance-audience relationships developed at the Festival have importance on two levels: the event is an immersion experience and the audiences there having broken free from their normal routines, are emerged, immediate and transient. Further, the concept of identity is recognised at Burning Man as both self-created and functional. The Burning Man Project staff too use ‘playa’ names and their work system utilises a supervisory model for managing the event that includes creative implementation for promoting its tenets as cultural ethics. The ideals of participation and the rules of ‘leave no trace’, or the policy by which attendees bring out what they bring in, that are held by the Festival inspire communalism

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and set behavioural standards that build a community of participants that is self-reliant. The larger Burning Man community outside of the Festival keeps alive that spirit by demonstrating locally their commitment to the ideals of involvement and meaningful experience. Communication and participation, therefore, ideologically cooperate with non-commodification and communal living as guiding cultural principles and practices both at and outside of the Festival for the community it creates. CONCLUSION The Burning Man Festival offers participants a landscape that is vast and, like the theatrical art forms it hosts, hybrid in nature and seemingly unlimited in vision. Burning Man as a life experience is one that is hard to capture, let alone explain. Part of the Burning Man experience is the inability of participants to really explain what Burning Man is and is like – to know that, one must simply go. This moment of recognition thereby represents the initial awareness of the cultural experience of Burning Man, one that turns spectators into performers. In as much as it is a transformative experience, it must be emphasised that it does offer participants the opportunity not only to break free of the social roles that are imposed on them and that they play out everyday, but also the chance to interact with others in a uniquely performative way. That said, it is most certainly a wild week-long party in the desert, but to focus on this solely would ignore the more complex truths: Burning Man as a culture is a heterotopic stop on the postmodern landscape of America. It is a liminoid space that has evolved from an event to an experiment in communitymaking and a populist movement. Burning Man thrives on the interconnectedness of those who attend as committed cultural performers. A performance culture is one that edifies itself; it is a real and imaginary space created to support self-expression and encourage interactivity. Burning Man’s performance culture is a place which creates multiple meanings by its philosophy and its ability to draw participants. As the escapist alternative to mainstream society in America, the festival culture of Burning Man philosophically rejects commodification, encourages radical self-expression and subverts the usual social order by providing participants the opportunity to explore change in social behaviour away from economically competitive

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living. Burning Man’s performance culture is also thoroughly permissive and by its potential to be transformative, introduces participants to a meaningful, wholly unique escape from mainstream society. The genre of performance art and the American avant-garde have benefited by connection, since Burning Man began exposing a liberating brand of self-created theatricality to many through its performance culture. Many more individuals in society than could ever be reached in black box theatres now know the meaning of ‘live art’. Since its inception, the event has recognised and actively touted a philosophy that marks a kind of spontaneous interactivity as creative collaboration of the most intimate and impressive kind. In its design, the site has been considered by its organisers for the way that the Festival can encourage performativity in and through its participants. Festival culture in this particular sense is about the construction and presentation of identity. The performance etiquette at Burning Man, as is true for the art created there, is not held to expectation in terms of aesthetics, quality or usefulness. The only requisite is that the expression, like the art piece, reflect one’s own deep personality, similar to performance art’s conceptuality. The spontaneity of performance involves a range that includes body art and mixed media, the integration of traditional theatrical genres, and extends to informal and improvised and staged interpersonal actions. Over the course of the event, attendees may witness the broadest range of creative expressions: street theatre, costuming, fire art, character shifting, opera, improvisation, music and dance, drums and percussion, processionals, mock fights, games and sport, S/M, bondage sports, fetishism, rave and disco, tribal and historical re-enactment. Performativity extends further to exhibitionism through the body art and nudity represented there and so, like performance art in the past, challenges issues of censorship and free speech. Liberating performance of the kind that is practised at Burning Man permits participants to transgress, play and thereby explore themselves and the culture more fully. Interactivity is key to this equation as is community and the feeling of belonging that is generated there. Today more than ever, the disillusionment many individual artists in society feel is what attracts them to such an unconfined site for exhibition as is possible at Burning Man. And while they may not gain better access to wealth and fame, they are able to show their work to a very large, very interested and very interesting audience, whose sensibilities

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ostensibly are curious, non-judgmental and grateful. The people at Burning Man represent artists and participants who continue to spread the word of its reputation with tales of unabashed hedonism, free expression and never before imagined art. The culture of the Burning Man Festival then comes to find acknowledgement and reveals itself in the ‘performing’ that participants continue to do in mainstream society, offering new meanings of performativity. Bim Mason states in his writing that: ‘Just as the real world becomes more theatrical, so theatre can move into new areas of performance’ (Mason 1992: 208). Primitive drama with its origins in communal festival has, in this country, been evolving in scope since the inception of Burning Man, because its organisers provide a vast and open natural place, which is antithetical to the modern/art world. In the Black Rock Desert is a landscape equivalent to a blank slate, where no one is a spectator and no one leaves a trace. Additionally, the Festival, beyond the entrance gate, supports taboos against commodification and instead encourages gift exchange, communal living, environmental respect and creative self-expression. Participants to Burning Man have, in their immersion experience, a liberty which allows the definitions of performance and space to be engaged with, redefined, often transcended and re-coded, even if only temporarily. _________________________ NOTES 1

Dr. Jeremy Todd Hockett in his 2004 dissertation, ‘Reckoning Ritual and Counterculture in the Burning Man Community: Communication, Ethnography, and the Self in Reflexive Modernism (University of New Mexico)’, was the first to emphasize the connections between Turner's theories and Burning Man. These ideas have been further explored by Dr. Lee Gilmore in her essay, ‘Fires in the Heart: Ritual, Pilgrimage, and Transformation at Burning Man’, in the 2005 book, Afterburn: Reflections on Burning Man (Gilmore and M. Van Proyen, (eds) Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), where she considers the idea of Burning Man as a place for communitas and as a liminoid event.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, L. (2002) ‘Burning Spin: Organizers of the Burning Man Festival Pull Out All The Stops To Control The Press –And It’s a Good Thing They Do’ in SF Weekly, San Francisco: August 28, 2002.

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Auslander, P. (1992) Presence and Resistance: Postmodern and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Auslander, P. (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Routledge: New York. Bakhtin, M. (1984) Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Cremona, V. A., Eversmann, P., Maanen, H. van, Sauter, W & Tulloch, J. (eds), (2004) Theatrical Events: Borders Dynamics and Frames, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Debord, G. (1983) Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Black and Red. Doherty, B. (2004) This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground, New York: Little, Brown and Company. Foucault, M. (1986) ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16 (Spring): 22-27. Gilmore, L. & Proyen, M. van (eds), (2005) Afterburn: Reflections on Burning Man, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Gilmore, L. (2005) ‘Fires of the Heart: Ritual, Pilgrimage, and Transformation’ in Gilmore, L. & Proyen, M. van (eds), (2005) Afterburn: Reflections on Burning Man, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Goldberg, R. (2001) Performance: Futurism to the Present, London: Thames and Hudson. Goldberg, R. (1998) Performance: Live Art Since 1960, New York: Abrams. Harvey, L. (1997) ‘Burning Man: An Oral History’ in Burning Man, San Francisco: Hardwired. Harvey, L. (2000) ‘La Vie Boheme: Bohemian Values, Populist Politics, and the New Avant-Garde’, Lecture at Walker Art Center. Minneapolis, MN. February 24. Harvey, L. (2002) ‘Viva La Xmas’, Speech delivered at Cooper Union. New York, NY. April 25, 2002. Kershaw, B. (1999) The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, New York: Routledge. Kershaw, B. (2003) ‘Curiosity or Contempt: On Spectacle, the Human, and Activism’ in Theatre Journal: December, 55, 4. Kreuter, H. (ed) (2002) Drama in the Desert: The Sights and Sounds of Burning Man, San Francisco: Raised Barn Press. Martin, J., Seffrin, G. & Wissler, R. (2004) ‘The Festival is a Theatrical Event’, Cremona, V. A., Eversmann, P., Maanen, H. van, Sauter, W & Tulloch, J. (eds), (2004) Theatrical Events: Borders Dynamics and Frames, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Mason, B. (1992) Street Theatre and Other Outdoor Performance, London: Routledge. Schechner, R. (1985) Between Theatre and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schechner, R. & Schuman, M. (1976) Ritual, Play and Performance. New York: Seabury Press. Schechner, R. (1988) Performance Theory, London: Routledge. Schechner, R. (1993) The Future of Ritual, London: Routledge.

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Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Chicago: Aldine Press. Turner, V. (1974) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Turner, V. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Seriousness of Human Play. New York: PAJ Publications.

Turner, V. (1986) The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Van Rhey, D. (1997) ‘Burning Man and the Art of the Nineties: A Conversation with Larry Harvey’, http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/lectures/90s_art.html

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COMMUNITY BUILDING WITHIN A FESTIVAL FRAME – WORKING CLASS CELEBRATIONS IN GERMANY 1918-331 MATTHIAS WARSTAT

The creation of political communities was an important goal for the labour movement from its very beginning in the nineteenth century. Recent studies have stressed the enormous social and cultural heterogeneity within the working class, thus distancing themselves to some extent from Marxist and class-orientated views. The focus of many social historians interested in labour history has shifted from expressions of a general ‘class-consciousness’ to the diversity of the social conditions, cultural milieus, political orientations and ways of life of working class people. Considering the internal distinctions even within the ranks of the labour organisations, it seems far from natural that for decades a labour movement with a strong sense of community could develop and persist in many European societies. Obviously, active measures of community building had to be taken in order to provide functioning political communities among the working class people. What Benedict Anderson (1983) has shown for national communities also applies to working class communities: They are not simply a given fact, but are based on imagination, collective desires, illusions and emotions, which require active and strategic inducement. Some specific strategies to encourage the development of a proletarian community are to be presented in this article, with reference to examples from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and its unions (Freie Gewerkschaften) in Weimar Germany (1918-33). This issue of ‘community building’ is directly related to the subject of this book, because the concept of festival helps us to understand the framework of and methods employed for political community building in the late 19th and early 20th century. Political communities were established within different kinds of cultural performances such as gatherings, demonstrations, party conventions and – most frequently – political celebrations. These celebrations (e.g. May Day celebrations, summer festivities, commemoration ceremonies), which attracted a wider number of participants than other types of political events, cannot be reduced to the function of

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‘embellishing’ real politics. At the time they were the basis for effective community building: through the regularity of their occurrence, for example, their repetitive structure and their attraction for very divergent groups. The communities I refer to in this article owed their development to celebrations that can be described as ‘festival-like’: These events were – performative: i.e. they consisted of cultural performances; – multi-centric: i.e. several different performances were integrated into one and the same event; – co-ordinated: i.e. the different performances were attuned to one another regarding their contents and the timing (usually, this was the responsibility of specialised committees); – varied: i.e. the different performances were combined to meet all kind of requirements (aesthetic, social, political and economic) and could therefore appeal to audiences with a variety of preferences. I will argue that the ‘festival-likeness’ of political celebrations was an important contributory factor in community building. The development of a community spirit took place within the framework of a festival. (Applying the word ‘festival’ to such events is, of course, a heuristic undertaking, seen from a contemporary perspective. German workers of the 1920s were not at all familiar with that word. Today, the English expression has gained widespread acceptance in Germany. In early 20th century the German word ‘Festspiele’ was common – but this concept, which probably came closest to the English ‘festival’, was rooted in a Wagnerian tradition and had a conservative connotation. It would therefore not have been used by the progressive labour movement, at least not with reference to an event of political relevance.) Looking at working class celebrations in Weimar Germany, one is struck by the co-existence of very different, partly antagonistic strategies of community building. In the politically and socially deeply-divided German society of the post-war era, the creation of communities was both complicated and of vital importance for all political parties. The changes between pre-war and post-war Germany affected not only the political context, which had become more democratic and competitive, but also the cultural environment in which the construction of political communities had to take place. Working class celebrations in the 1920s were embedded in a specific

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contemporary playing culture,2 for which socialist organisers had to meet taxing demands, if they wanted to keep pace with the competition. In the bigger cities a variety of innovative, consumerorientated leisure amenities, and yet quite affordable commercial attractions (cinemas, music halls, gambling casinos, cafés featuring dancing, sports events, boxing, ice skating, circus, etc.) were already available to a large proportion of the working-class population and increased its desire for entertainment and performances. Labour movement officials concerned with publicity and cultural activities consequently became involved in the modernisation and re-shaping of the traditional festive events. The open, festival-like structure of many of those events provided the opportunity for implementing both traditional and innovatory methods of community building at the same time. A ‘community’ in the 1920s could either be evoked in a relaxed, leisurely sociable gathering on the basis of mixed festive entertainment, or in a strictly homogenized, more or less authoritarian performance of unity. Each strategy had its particular advantages and disadvantages. I will begin by giving an example of the more traditional means of community building that has its origins in the 19th century (section 1). Then I will turn to an innovatory method, which became quite dominant in the decades between World War I and II – not only in the labour movement, but also in entirely different political milieus. This method was linked with a certain type of theatre, the socalled ‘Massenspiel’ (play for the masses) (section 2), and aimed to achieve a far-reaching homogenisation of all participants, which led to specific opportunities and problems (section 3). 1. COMMUNITY BUILDING THROUGH MIXED ENTERTAINMENT Traditionally, the biggest entertainment events of the German labour movement were organised by the urban unions. With their popular summer weekend celebrations in July and August, union officials intended to offer their supporters experiences which provided them with an opportunity to relax and socialise, and also served the purpose of impressing the urban public with the tremendous number of participants, thereby gaining new members. These traditional events undoubtedly provided the participants with a feeling of being part of a community. The atmosphere of merriment and joy at the gathering

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aimed at mobilising even the less committed sympathisers with a weaker affiliation to the organisations. For their joint summer celebration on August 28th 1927, the Berlin unions rented sixteen restaurant halls, most of which were situated on the banks of the river Spree. The organisers hoped to provide leisurely entertainment, although political undertones were not absent. The celebration programme advertised choir concerts of the workers’ singing league at different venues in the city. Proletarian songs, brass band music and ‘big tombolas’ were laid on to entertain the whole family. In the afternoon all restaurants offered coffee in family pots (‘Kaffee in Kannen zu haben’), and for the evening a gigantic firework display (‘ein Riesen-Feuerwerk’) was announced, which was to take place at the riverside. Other restaurants put on shows of artistry (‘Artistische Vorstellungen’) performed by members of a so-called “International Artistic Lodge”. Lotteries attracted visitors with tempting prizes, among them two men’s bicycles, ten torches and 200 books.3 The next morning the official social democratic newspaper Vorwärts reported that, ‘favoured by the weather, the celebration took a glorious course’.4 This agreeable gettogether was preceded by several processions and a mass rally on a meadow in the district of Treptow, which many of the participants did not attend, preferring, to secure themselves a seat in one of the restaurants. Generally, the majority of participants seemed to perceive the summer celebration as an opportunity for social interaction rather than for political activity. The programme reveals that, while the ‘earnest’ mass rally in Treptow lasted for less than an hour, the amusement began in the middle of the afternoon and continued at the outdoor restaurants and beer gardens until closing time. People gathered around the tables in familiar, animated groups: The sixteen restaurants were soon filled with bustling activity. The demand for tables and chairs, especially in the beer gardens situated on the banks of the Spree, exceeded the supply by far. Even those who had come late, however, gradually found a place. In addition to the many music bands, entertainment was provided by members of the Workers’ Singing League. Eagerly awaited, particularly by the youth, gigantic fireworks marked the end of this most successful union celebration. The fireworks literally took a dazzling course and instructed the spectators in fiery lettering to bond with one another and with the proletarian cause.5

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Round dances at the Young Workers Festival in Weimar 1920. Published with kind permission from Archiv der Arbeiterjugendbewegung, Oer-Erkenschwick.

Unionist mass celebrations, which had been organised since the beginning of the twentieth century in many of the bigger industrial cities, offered an all-inclusive and popular kind of entertainment. Their importance for the development of team spirit and cohesion within the labour organisations can hardly be overestimated. Even as early as in the nineteenth century, when women and minors were excluded from political conventions, the entertainment celebrations – in contrast to other types of events – succeeded in integrating not only the men, but also the whole family, in a pleasurable experience. Announcements in the broadsheet newspapers of the time show the range of amusements on offer to all age groups. This variety could be offered because of the multi-centric, festival-like structure of the celebrations: at Düsseldorf’s union celebration in 1911, for example, guests could enjoy a ‘big gala concert, amusements of all kinds (political and satirical curiosity cabinet, puppet theatre, merry-gorounds, shooting galleries, knife throwing etc.)’ as well as a ‘raffle of precious things’. ‘Sack races, climbing frames’ and other attractions were prepared for the children. People were allowed to enjoy food and

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drink they had brought with them in the ‘beer-, coffee- and milktents’. In a mixed open-air programme appealing to the old and young alike, members of the manifold proletarian leisure organisations demonstrated their skills: cyclists, singers and amateur actors were honoured for their efforts and could enjoy the opportunity of contributing to the economic strength of the organisations: entertainment celebrations provided an additional source of income for the club funds, as the organisers could charge admission fees without having to pay for the performers, artists and singers themselves. However, the higher-ranking members of the labour organisations frequently failed to recognise the important effects brought about by popular events of this kind. By fulfilling various purposes (they offered an opportunity to meet friends and acquaintances, to be seen, to seek sensations, to integrate the whole family, and also to make money), entertainment celebrations indeed stabilised the proletarian milieus. It is no coincidence that these festivities had existed since the very beginning of the labour movement and in all of its organisational branches with a remarkable continuity. The effective mixture of social, aesthetic, communicative and financial aspects was crucial for an internally heterogeneous movement which was always threatened by centrifugal forces – at least crucial enough to be valued by the local activists. Particularly after World War I and the ‘unfinished revolution’ of 1918/19, in which the German labour movement had split into two conflicting parties, the majority of the disappointed supporters felt a growing need for simple, reassuring, indisputable pleasures. In the face of the harsh realities of the 1920s, the unifying socialist vision faded and political differences and uncertainty about the right strategy made themselves felt. Hence, the need for consensual events that were able to satisfy a wide spectrum of expectations to an equal extent became increasingly urgent. For the local milieus, traditional entertainment communities – based on the old concept of shared amusement, eating and drinking, enthusiasm and sociability – remained a common way to react to this need. But there was another way, and it was becoming increasingly significant.

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2. COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT THROUGH THEATRE PRODUCTIONS FOR THE MASSES Facing the challenge of increasing competition with other political organisations as well as other leisure-time attractions, socialist officials and local organisers worked hard on re-shaping the traditional celebrations of the labour movement. These efforts provided the background for the invention of the so-called ‘ArbeiterMassenspiel’ (play for the working masses) around 1920. The open, multi-centric festival-like structure of many proletarian entertainment events facilitated the adoption of this new type of theatre. As soon as it was introduced, however, it led to a remarkable transformation of the workers’ celebration culture: between 1918 and 1933, theatre performances for the masses increasingly became the focus of attention within the festive programmes. The ‘Arbeiter-Massenspiel’ was originally a type of collective open-air performance comparable to the English pageants. From 1920 onwards three major characteristics of the new genre became distinct: 1. The dramatic plot or development – sometimes an antagonistic conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed people, sometimes a process of negotiation between progressive and conservative groups within the oppressed class – did not primarily unfold through individual dramatis personae, but through powerful groups of people. 2. These homogeneous groups performed as rhythmically synchronised choirs, which were either singing, speaking, moving or dancing (in any possible combination). 3. The whole performance was organised by departments of the labour movement and took place in front of a mass audience in big halls or open air venues such as stadiums or open-air theatres. Often the theatrical space was structured as an arena. The underlying tone of these proletarian mass performances was not light-hearted, but serious or even pathetic. Nevertheless, they were frequently integrated into entertainment celebrations – thereby providing a certain standard of political awareness and a socialist stance along with the bulk of apparently harmless amusements. The Leipzig union festivities, celebrated every year on a mid-summer Sunday, were a classical example for this constellation. During the day the participants enjoyed beer and snacks at numerous booths, there were children’s games and other popular attractions taking place

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outside. The municipal theatre invited the workers to special lowprice-performances. As there were no speeches, demonstrations or important announcements, the only political references that were made were those given during the mass performance in the evening, which formed the highlight of the programmes in the early 1920s (Pfützner 1960). Similarly, the big proletarian sports festivals of the 1920s were not of a political nature, apart from the mass theatre performance, which was the culmination of the festive activities. The most important prerequisite for such performances was an adequate number of participants: with over a hundred actors, these performances could only be successfully accommodated in very big halls or stadiums, where an audience of one thousand or more was required to fill them. It was for this reason that they continued to be a feature of the urban centres of the movement until 1933.6 In the late 1920s and early 1930s mass theatre performances almost became the most important feature in festival programmes: the proclamations of the working-class celebrations and the ensuing commentaries frequently referred to them as the ‘highlights’ or ‘centres’ of the event. Mass performances attracted a lot of attention, if only for the simple reason that they were the part of the festival requiring the most preparatory work. It was no mean task for the organisers of such events to arrange a coordinated sequence of rehearsals with hundreds or even thousands of participants and up to a dozen of organisations involved. Preparations usually took a couple of weeks. In the last week before the performance, the participants would practise daily in the evening hours. It took an enormous effort to motivate such an army of amateur actors and to make them work regularly. The directors even had to rely on volunteers for the costume and set designs, and often enough, the wives or mothers of the actors did this job. The local socialist press supported the organisers by regularly publishing appeals, instructions and rehearsal plans. The amount of work invested was easily perceived by the public, so that the performances were seen as proof of the efficiency of the labour movement.7 Bearing in mind that the festival-like celebrations had numerous decentralised attractions, the mass theatre performance was one of the very few opportunities during the festivities where all participants congregated and could see the others. These performances were similar to the big processions, where each individual segment of the

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movement – the proletarian youth, the combat units, local organisations and workers’ sports groups, etc. – was made clearly recognisable with the help of encoded signs (uniforms, standards, flags, emblems), making the social and cultural spectrum of the movement obvious to all onlookers. In a similar way, the mass performances gave an impression of the movement’s plurality, because the various participating groups of the performance could be distinguished in the different choric formations: the members of the proletarian youth, for example, played young socialist pioneers, the very young members of the so-called ‘Roten Falken’ played workers’ children, formations of the proletarian-democratic defence organisation ‘Reichsbanner’ played combat units, etc. This could be called a self-referential mode of representation, as the actors certainly represented a (collective) role given in the script, but in doing so, they also ‘played’ themselves and asserted their own position within the movement. In the announcements and reports of the socialist press on mass performances, the participating organisations were listed and complimented on their contribution. Thus the actors of a certain collective group did not ‘disappear’ behind their representation. In this way the mass performance embodied the movement as a whole, independent of the plot that was presented. The most important requirement for the generation of a political community was the active participation of the audience. Activating the audience was a difficult, complex process, as can be seen from the example of a mass celebration on the occasion of the Social Democrats’ Party Convention in Magdeburg in 1929. From their very beginning in the nineteenth century, the big conventions of the labour parties were embedded in festive fringe events that made those meetings attractive for a proletarian public, reaching a much larger audience in this way than merely the small circle of delegates. Supporters from all over the country made their way to the convention city and participated in the various events throughout the week in which they took place. Seen as a whole, the festive events assumed a festival-like character: they were elaborate, multi-centric, and were coordinated by a central organisational committee which was able to utilise them to fulfil various purposes. In the Weimar Republic, where political parties competed far more fiercely for public presence than in the monarchy before World War I, an increasingly professional convention management used the publicity these annual conventions

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invariably received to build up an impressive image of the social democratic institutional world. The local workers’ newspaper, Die Volksstimme, commented on the occasion of the Magdeburg SPD convention in 1929 that ‘they [the annual SPD conventions] reflect an image of the movement – both externally and internally’.8 In addition to the elected delegates, ordinary members of the SPD and its fellow organisations came to Magdeburg from all over the country in order to be seen at these social democratic celebrations, which were the highlight of the year. The convention took place throughout the last week of May: an opening ceremony, the play for the masses, remembrance ceremonies, garden concerts, balls, youth celebrations and other festive events accompanied the official debates of the delegates. Scheduled for the Wednesday evening, the event announced as ‘Volksfest’ (the people’s celebration) took a central position in the festival programme. The setting was a lake called the ‘Adolf-Mittag-See’ on the exhibition site near the city centre. Over 1 200 actors, among them choirs, proletarian combat units, workers’ sports associations, children’s groups and an orchestra presented Emil R. Müller’s ‘Festspiel’ (festival play) Flammende Zeit (Flaming Times), directed by the dancing instructor Martin Gleisner from Berlin. After paying a small admission fee (40 Pfennig), the public was allowed to take part in the spectacle, although they were ‘urgently requested’ not to occupy the reserved seats for convention delegates. The Volksstimme reported the following day that ‘at nightfall crowds of people gathered around the lake – the banks have never been so packed with people’. Another source confirms that 30 000 spectators were there. Seated on the other side of the lake and facing the stage, the audience had a view of the surface of the water and of the other bank, where at 9 pm ‘three dazzling flares’ signalled the beginning of the performance. Several choirs spread all over the area, their alternating appearances marked by lighting effects, portrayed a dramatic vision of the liberation of the working class. The performance availed itself of all kinds of choric action – singing, speaking, gestures, rhythmic movements and dance. However, it did not suffice that only the members of the choirs experienced community in this way – it needed to affect all participants. It was therefore of primary importance for the festival directors to provide an irresistible opportunity for interaction between the actors and spectators. When it came to the performance, the

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‘ideal’, pre-shaped collective bodies of the choirs in their monumental formations, trained in preparation for the event, encountered for the most part participants who were confronted with these activities with little or no preparation. It was rather difficult to assess the outcome of this unbalanced encounter. As it was the highlight of the event, however, it determined the success or failure of the festival. To handle this problem, the directors of these social democratic mass performances relied on different theatrical techniques that will be looked at more closely. Flammende Zeit, the mass play of the Magdeburg convention in 1929, is a good example of the techniques employed. The performance culminated in an impressive final scene: Starting from the middle of the shore opposite the spectators, small boats and processions of flag- and torch-bearers approached the audience simultaneously. The boats established a red, glowing, bridge-like formation, connecting both shores of the lake. The processions of flag- and torch-bearers marched in long rows along the left and right banks. Finally, all actors united on the side of the lake at the spectators’ grandstand. There were probably around 30 000 people, creating a homogenous mass from which one could perceive the music and singing of the socialist march loudly and clearly. (Had it not been for the laziness of some of the participants, it would have been even louder.) (Kretzen 1929: 169)

The highlight of the presentation was therefore this homogenous formation which finally united the participants. All the preceding scenes contributed to the generation of this collective body by evoking an increasingly cordial relationship between the choirs and the audience. The structure of the area in which the performance took place already aimed at encouraging the development of a feeling of unity between actors and spectators. Three sides of the lake and the surface itself served as stages. The audience was situated on a platform on the fourth side which extended into the lake in some parts. Due to this arrangement, the audience was not separated from the performance, but was literally surrounded by the presentations. Those spectators sitting at the front of the platform doubtless had the feeling of being in the midst of the actors and very near to the centre of the action. From the very beginning of the play, the plot aimed at achieving the closest possible mutual identification between the spectators and the collective body of actors. The choirs were to be

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regarded as ‘representatives of the masses’ and seen as a model of solidarity, unity and vitality by the audience at the representative function. The special quality of the working-class mass performances was that the spectator was able to identify both with the collectives that were being represented and with the actors who were representing them: masses of workers were being portrayed suffering in a way familiar to most of the spectators, who knew the exhausting and monotonous working routine all too well. Choral groups moved around, portraying ‘male workers at the conveyor belt, foremen, workers at the lever, arms of machines, rows of working girls, female workers at the conveyor belt’ (Kretzen 1929: 168). This presentation of a group of hard-working people allowed the spectators to recognise the daily stress and strain of their own work. At the same time, though, they could identify with the actors playing the part of this group, because in the proclamations, programmes and partly even through their costumes, these actors were unmistakably identifiable as members of the same labour organisations that the spectators belonged to. What everyone saw behind the masses they represented were real working class sportsmen, real groups of socialist youth clubs, real proletarian combat units and so on. It was important to create a physical harmony between the actors and the audience to generate this twofold identification. The spectator had to pick up the rhythm of the choirs quickly, and had to incorporate and reproduce it physically in order to gradually participate in the general movement. Martin Gleisner, director of the Magdeburg performance, regarded the appeal of his production to the audience to identify with the actors and interpret their roles to be of only secondary importance. He considered the rhythmic impact to be far more effective and significant: if the audience was not able to feel the collective movements, if it continued to ask for a message and an interpretation, then the directors would have to take some basic measures in Gleisner’s opinion; they would have to give some simple hints at the meaning in order to make people receptive to what really mattered: the collective rhythm (Gleisner 1930: 9). This rhythmic structure had to be distinct from the very beginning, so that the untrained spectators who were unaccustomed to such movements were able to reproduce them. For the same reason, more complicated polyrhythms were avoided.

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The last step required for the grand finale was an explicit unification of actors and spectators. Boats leaving from the opposite shore formed a kind of swimming bridge, connecting both sides of the lake as well as the stage and the audience. At the same time flag- and torch-bearers marched along the sides of the lake towards the spectators to create a ‘homogenous block of people’ with them. This act culminated at the point where the collective of actors, which by now ideally included all participants of the event, started singing a song together and proved its unison in actu. 3. PROBLEMS OF THEATRICAL COMMUNITIES The product of this mode of community building could be called a ‘theatrical community’ (Warstat 2005). The attribute ‘theatrical’ emphasises the fact that community building in this case is not only dependent on a cultural performance (the celebration), but also on a certain kind of theatre (play for the masses). The harmonious community spirit of the choir was transferred to the audience, even though this audience was not at all homogenous or stable in itself. Due to the sharply differing views on the revolution of 1918/19, the foundation of the KPD and a number of serious party rifts (for example, between old and young members, between Marxists and pragmatists), the German labour movement of the Weimar Republic was far from being a harmonious community. The spectators, in fact, identified themselves with a virtual self-image when they identified with the choirs, which is why the creation of communities at such festivals was of an overall imaginary nature. It is therefore arguable whether these imaginative ways of constructing communities in performances were actually effective and, if so, to what extent. If the euphoric reports of the proletarian press can be relied on, the community spirit became an intensely perceived reality at these mass events – a reality that could be experienced in the form of both a mental and a somatic sensation, affecting all senses and the entire body. But, of course, the descriptions of the labour press do not necessarily correspond with the actual sensations of the audience. There are at least three arguments that would favour a more sceptical interpretation of the enthusiastic reports of the proletarian reporters. 1. Any creation of a feeling of identity based on a binary process of exclusion can result in an unforeseen and undesirable

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destructive reaction on the part of what is excluded. The idealised collectives that were to be formed in mass performances were to be both an embodiment of productivity / energy and a negation of passivity / lethargy. However, it was difficult for the participants of proletarian festivals to overcome this very passive, cautious attitude. At the climax of the performance, when the active and visible participation of the audience was required, their passivity could become apparent in a disturbing way. If, for example, the final song where everybody was supposed to join in sounded too weak, as was seemingly the case at the lakeside celebration in Magdeburg, the intended manifestation of a community was endangered, diminished or even failed completely. Since this singing together was usually reserved for the climax of the programme, a half-hearted participation could spoil the entire impression. Frequent complaints in the proletarian press indicate that such lethargy was quite commonplace. The active participation of the visitors was hindered by the prevalence of more traditional receptive attitudes. Organisers often complained about participants watching the collective performances in an aesthetic, distant manner, rather than understanding that ‘this was not a performance of the kind seen in the theatre’ (Gleisner 1930: 9). The intended creation of a community spirit could only work if the audience gave the collective formations in the performance the status of an important, meaningful ‘reality’ that came much closer to reality than the common concept of theatre at the time, which went back to the bourgeois illusionist theatre of the nineteenth century. 2. The new festive theatre for the masses also lacked the fundamental support of accompanying theoretical debates in the social democratic discussions on celebrations and was treated with a certain reservation. Many of the officials of the labour parties who specialised in cultural affairs and whose opinion was of some weight in the relevant journals felt committed to the old rationalist tradition of the workers’ education movement, and were therefore sceptical of the highly emotional style of the new mass events. There were, in fact, two contradictory social democratic positions competing for cultural dominance: while many festival directors and choir conductors complained about the prevalent rationalism and logocentricity of the celebration practice, many of the educational activists were already warning that the people’s play encouraged the development of an over-sentimental, romantically harmonised community spirit. The

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labour movement was therefore not willing to accept emotionalist strategies as readily as the competing political directions were. Critical undertones continued to make themselves heard and did certainly not contribute to the success of the mass performance model. 3. The fact that labour officials started to experiment with alternative forms of performance in the late 1920s and early 1930s supplies us with further evidence that this model was not entirely successful. Social democratic festival directors started showing some interest in the agitprop theatre that the communists had developed before. After 1930 left-wing social democrats in particular came to the conclusion that ‘nothing is more adequate for the shape of proletarian festivals than political revues and satirical programmes’ and that these more rationalist events could create a bond, which was ‘at least as strong as the big theatre’ (Schiff 1931: 26). These proposals meant some dissociation from the pathetic, unrealistic earnestness of the mass theatre model. Solidarity and community spirit remained the undisputed leading ideas of the social democratic festival culture but, facing the economic depression and massive unemployment after 1930 (Winkler 1990), even the formerly enthusiastic promoters of festive mass performances came to the conclusion that these ideas could also be mediated through politically more aggressive and at the same time less expensive forms of theatre. The more difficult the economic and political situation became, the less convincing the optimism of the proletarian mass plays sounded. In times of crisis, when real working class life was full of privation, the splendour of huge mass performances seemed slightly out of place. 4. CONCLUSION In early twentieth-century Germany various strategies of political community building existed. Many of these strategies made use of a festive frame, which can be described as ‘festival-like’. The festivallike character that larger proletarian celebrations had assumed from their very beginnings in the nineteenth century was a crucial tool for the encouragement of community building. Typical features of festivals helped to create the impression of strong, well-functioning communities: only a high number of participants enabled an impressive mass performance and provided a powerful visual argument for convincing political opponents of the labour movement’s organisational strength. The multi-centric structure of the bigger

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proletarian celebrations and the variety of the numerous attractions within one and the same event made it possible to appeal to the differing preferences in taste and style and to balance conflicting positions – for example, between generations or between pragmatists and assiduous educational officials (‘Kultursozialisten’). In contrast to single performances, festival-like events enabled a selection of various strategies of application. They therefore provided an opportunity for uniting a heterogeneous audience. The big proletarian celebrations of the 1920s lasted full weekends and sometimes several days. The more such events stood out as highlights of an organisation’s annual programme, the bigger was the chance to anchor the experience of solidarity and cohesion firmly in the memory of the participants. The repetitive structure of many of those events (e.g. the May Day celebrations) also promised a certain sustainability of festive experiences. During the 1920s it was one particular type of theatre (within the festival-like events), the proletarian mass play, which promised more effective community building. In fact, it seemed not only to allow the presentation of community spirit, but also its realisation: through evoking a feeling of togetherness between actors and spectators by means of rhythm and movement. In retrospect, however, it is tempting to comment with sober scepticism on the specific hopes of the time to create a political community. If these hopes were based to a large extent on the ability of mass theatre performances to activate and emotionalise people, how far could these effects be expected to outlive the end of each performance? Could they become a longlasting, reliable source of support for the organisations? With regards to the German labour movement of the 1920s, it cannot be denied that all these powerful yet fleeting and unstable evocations of community spirit were not able to compensate for the loss of political dreams and visions, and the weakness born from the inner conflicts between social democrats and communists. After all, festival-like events are outstanding events; they are – in a positive sense – exempted from everyday life. This is the secret of their attraction, but also an indication of their potential weakness, bearing in mind how improbable a durable transfer of a festival experience into everyday life is likely to be. Communities that are produced through forms of mass theatre will always remain theatrical constructions and will for this reason always be dependent on the

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transitory, unstable and uncontrollable nature of the theatrical. It seems rather doubtful that a sustainable, resistant political culture can be based on such communities. While this article has concentrated on the labour movement, the outlined methods of developing a community spirit were not adopted exclusively by the labour movement. Mass theatre performances similar to Flammende Zeit can also be found in the conservative, catholic, nationalist and fascist milieus of Weimar Germany (FischerLichte 2005). (These similarities apply to the methods and processes of community building, but the communities resulting from them obviously upheld conflicting values and pursued antagonistic programmes.) How can these techniques, which were adopted by leftwing as well as right-wing, democratic as well as authoritarian movements and regimes, be assessed? And concerning the left-wing theatrical communities: could they have provided – in spite of their affinity to socialist and rationalist values – fertile ground for the growth of the demagogic offerings of the Nazis? In order to answer such crucial questions, systematic comparisons of mass theatre performances in different and even antagonistic political milieus are urgently required.

NOTES 1

I am thankful to my colleague Saskya Iris Jain for a critical reading of this article and for her important support in its translation. 2 ‘Playing Culture’ is a concept defined by the FIRT working group ‘Theatrical Event’ as follows: ‘Playing Culture […] relates a particular festival to other festivals, other public events and cultural performances and areas of playing.’ (See Sauter In: Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames. Edited by Vicki Ann Cremona, Peter Eversmann, Hans van Maanen, Willmar Sauter and John Tulloch. Amsterdam: Rodopi Publishers, 2004, pp.10-14.) 3 See the programme ADGB-Ortskartell Berlin / AfA-Ortskartell Berlin 1927, pp. 67 and 12-13. 4 ‘Festtag – Kampftag. Der Aufmarsch der Groß-Berliner Gewerkschaften’, in: Vorwärts 44, no. 407, 29/8/1927. 5 ‘Die Kundgebung der Gewerkschaften in Treptow’, in: Vorwärts 44, no. 407, 29/8/1927. 6 However, people from rural areas also took part in these urban events. 7 The regular schedule of rehearsals for the Leipzig union celebrations can be studied through the daily announcements in the Leipziger Volkszeitung.

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“Unsre Parteitage”, in: Volksstimme (Magdeburg) Nr. 120, 40. Jg. vom 26.5.1929, Titelseite.

REFERENCES ADGB-Ortskartell Berlin and AfA-Ortskartell Berlin (eds), (1927) Gewerkschaftsfest Berlin 1927, Programmheft, Berlin: ADGB. Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Arbeiter-Turn-Zeitung. Zentralorgan des Arbeiter-Turn-und Sportbundes, 33.1925, 37.1929, Leipzig. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2005) Theater, Sacrifice, Ritual, London and New York: Routledge. Gleisner, M. (1930) ‘Der Bewegungschor’, in Kulturwille, 7, 1: 9-10. Kretzen, J. (1929) ‘Das Fest am See’, in Kulturwille, 6, 9: 168f-169. Leipziger Volkszeitung. Organ für die Interessen des gesamten werktätigen Volkes, 27.1920, 30.1923, 31.1924, 32.1925. Pfützner, K. (1960) Die Massenfestspiele der Arbeiter in Leipzig (1920-1924), Leipzig: Hofmeister. Schiff, F. (1931) ‘Über proletarische Festgestaltung’, in Der Klassenkampf (Berlin), 5, 1: 21-26. Vorwärts. Berliner Volksblatt. Zentralorgan der sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, 41.1924, 44.1927, 48.1931, 49.1932, Berlin. Volksstimme (Magdeburg) 40.1929. Warstat, M. (2005) Theatrale Gemeinschaften. Zur Festkultur der Arbeiterbewegung 1918-33, Tübingen and Basel: A. Francke. Winkler, H.A. (1990) Der Weg in die Katastrophe. Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1930 bis 1932, 2nd ed., Bonn: Dietz.

FESTIVALS IN RELIGIOUS OR SPIRITUAL CONTEXTS: EXAMPLES FROM JAPAN, CHINA, INDIA AND BANGLADESH CHRISTINA NYGREN

INTRODUCTION The theatre life in many Asian countries shows a great variety of examples of the significance of theatre and dance for a public at large, in everyday life as well as in religious or secular festivals and holidays. A considerable number of events keep the tradition of popular and folk theatre and dance alive, and the many different kinds of performances are of undeniable importance for the general public, especially in the countryside.1 This essay focuses on religious and spiritual festival traditions in Japan, China, India (with special reference to Bengal) and Bangladesh, where the performing arts not only play a part as aesthetic experience or as entertainment but the performances are more often significant for a feeling of community or serving as a unifying event for certain groups in the social structure as well as for keeping people in touch with less palpable phenomena like life and death. When seasons change or at critical moments in the life cycle, protective and healing forces can be evoked through theatre and dance at festival events and are also used to confirm and acknowledge the existence of an intangible place between this and other worlds. The English word ‘festival’ does not naturally correspond to the indigenous terminology used for religious and spiritual events in the actual countries. ‘Festival’ usually indicates a modern, sometimes commercial and mostly secular event with mainly Western content and fashion. In order to grasp the wider perspective of each country’s provincial and local traditions, customs and patterns of behaviour, it is necessary to apply a contextual approach for each defined geographical location. Theatrical performances and dance are often linked to the event and are particularly useful for teaching people about religion, history and moral values. Though many of these performances in recent years have had stiff competition from television, they are still an integral part of the lives of people in the provinces. The audience often participates in the event, either directly

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by dancing, speaking or singing, or by merely being present, feeling like participants in sacrificial rites, thanksgiving ceremonies or purification rituals. JAPANESE MATSURI – FESTIVAL FRENZY AND CEREMONIOUS SACRIFICE Taking Japan as an example, the matsuri phenomenon can be experienced and described in countless ways. The term is often translated as ‘festival’, a Western word which, due to its strong secular emphasis, does not adequately express the Japanese reality. Tens of thousands of matsuri are celebrated annually in Japan in the most varied contexts: in large and small shrines and temples, at the bottom of towering waterfalls, by unusual rock formations, by the sea and in rice paddies, during all seasons of the year. Music, song, dance and theatre are often very important elements in a matsuri. The blend of the divine and the worldly, solemnity, jesting and hawking, give the event a wide appeal, and the significance of this event cannot be described in brief terms. Matsuri festivals include processions, purification ceremonies, holy and secular dances, a real or symbolic meal and a blessing as the climax of the event. Although they vary considerably in different parts of the country in terms of form and content, duration and scope, one essential element is the encounter with one or more deities (kami). Few Japanese people, however, would characterise these events, in which ancestors and deities are honoured with dance and theatre, as religious in the Western sense of the word. Rather, they are considered rituals of social kinship with a diffusely expressed desire for good health and prosperity. Shishi (lions) and oni (demons) perform dances, and half-secret dramatic art and storytelling traditions that exist within defined regions are often handed down as hereditary knowledge, in the same way as folk songs and handicraft traditions. A rare matsuri where gods and mortals meet The bus crawls painfully slowly along the narrow, winding mountain road through slush and over slippery ice. It is in the beginning of May 1995. Kami, the Shinto deity whose name is often honoured with the suffix sama as a mark of respect, has found a temporary dwelling in the form of a sparsely adorned but carefully carved wooden box with four carrying poles attached. This portable shrine, called mikoshi, can

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Lots of mythical characters perform in the parades. The long nosed tengu is a troll like creature that is said to live in dark forests and high mountains. It is also associated with fertility symbolic. Photo by the author.

now be found on the seat behind the driver. It is six o’clock in the morning and 29 men and young school-age boys chosen from the population of a mountain village called Yamanomura are on their way, accompanied by a foreign woman (myself), to a festival that is held only every twenty years – the great Kamioka taisai festival. Everyone is in high spirits and no one feels the need to separate raw, worldly humour from a feeling of sublime solemnity. The members of the group delight at their own jokes. An intensely festive atmosphere surrounds the group of men, who just a couple of hours ago were barely awake as they knelt in the respectful seiza position on tatami mats in the dimly lit local Shinto temple. With bowed heads they demonstrated the proper respect by not attempting to steal a look as the priest performed the ceremony of transferring the deity’s spirit to its temporary home in the mikoshi. This rare event was formally celebrated with ceremonial sake which had been blessed and had earlier been offered to the deity.

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Apart from the priest, two other people had solemnly taken a drink of sake in honour of the deity. A man of 25 and his helper will for the next twelve hours perform the lion dance, shishimai, and will be the ones to awaken the sleeping lion and bring temporary and boisterous life to the highly decorated physiognomy of its head, and the accompanying indigo-blue cloth that will be transformed into the creature’s body. The journey down from the village to Kamioka, a slightly larger town, which usually takes 45 minutes, is taking almost twice as long today because of the bad road conditions. We finally arrive at the assembly hall that will be our dressing room and the deity’s resting place for the duration of this third and final day of the festival. During the first two days around a hundred kami and their dancing lions (shishi) and male attendants have had a rare and unusual opportunity to gather in the town’s main temple. Today another forty or so visiting deities will be carried through the streets of the town in a procession led by their local shishi, long-nosed mountain trolls and demons sweeping the area to clear it and those present of impurities and bad luck. Exhilaration is soon transformed into intense excitement when the procession from our village gets underway down a few steps leading to a side street that joins the main road leading to the main temple. A mythical troll circles the tragicomic pair that bring good fortune, Hyottoko and Okame, who wear the familiar masks of the imbecilic whistling man with pouting lips slanting up to his ear and his foolishly kind-hearted, short and plump wife. The villages not portraying any particular character are dressed in special festival jackets decorated with their village. An eight- or nine-year-old boy dressed in a colourful, elegant and richly embroidered costume makes a path for the shishi with sweeping gestures and choreographed dance steps. The ferocious dance purifies the street metre by metre for the mikoshi carried by the villagers following behind. A large traditional drum is towed on a cart with its drummer, accompanied by a flutist, standard-bearer and other attendants following at a slow, dignified pace. Soon the group joins up with the larger procession of deities, shishi/lions and attendants along the main street, which is lined with an almost impenetrable crowd of smartly-dressed onlookers. At the point where we can catch the first glimpse of the great stairway up to the temple, the street is lined with children rhythmically

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beating metal gongs. Many of the onlookers bow their heads in respect putting their hands together and lowering their eyes as the deities in their mikoshi approach. The children are both thrilled and frightened by the costumed characters and the irascible, dancing lion. The last stage of the journey up to the temple is up a broad and high stone stairway, partially covered for this occasion by a wooden ramp with platforms where shishi from the host temple wait for their counterparts from visiting villages. When one walks through the temple’s torii (the gateway that indicates you are passing into holy ground), one passes a stone lantern with a burning flame that was brought here secretly and ceremoniously from the mother temple in Ise. At this point people come to attention, and each delegation that arrives radiates a sense of seriousness and solemnity. A matsuri, or festival, is an occasion for gods to meet and be among mortals. Old-world music is heard from inside the temple, enticing participating groups to enter one after the other with kami into the temple’s inner chamber. The spirit is removed from the mikoshi by priests who wear facemasks so that their breath will not sully or bother the spirit of the kami. Pieces of white cloth attached to poles are held around the kami preventing the onlookers from seeing what is behind. The priests run with the deity’s spirit to the inner sanctuary of the temple – a meeting point for all of today’s visiting kami. The empty mikoshi is placed in a tented area ready to carry the deity home at the end of the day. The awaited moment has arrived when the Yamanomura village’s lion, Morimo shishi, will dance on the specially erected stage next to the temple. Eerie music played on flute and drums announces the shishi’s impressive entrance. Two young men form the lion’s body. The lion head’s movements and expressions, through the men, form a link between the dancing figure and its audience. As the dance proceeds, wild frenzied acrobatics mellow into gentle sentimentality. The audience members watch with excitement all of the various steps and movements. Under the cloth that forms the body of the shishi, the dancers are sometimes visible, sometimes hidden. One moment the creature bends its front legs and holds its head close to the floor with intensive nodding and clapping of the jaw, the next it stands on its hind legs in a triumphant gesture of superiority before falling down and coming to rest with only tiny rhythmic

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twitching movements to maintain the living connection between the shishi and the audience. It pauses as if concentrating before pouncing again suddenly and making rapid head movements accompanied by the clapping sound of its jaws. The people closest to the stage accept this as a blessing with bowed heads. Meanwhile, other groups arrive in a steady stream at the temple, ferry their local kami into the inner chambers, and wait for their turn to perform their local version of the lion dance. The audience members leave the stage from time to time to taste the region’s famous sake, served free of charge from a large wooden barrel nearby. Sake, which was originally considered nectar for the gods and continues to be a votive offering to kami, is now a drink that encourages the audience members as participants in the event. Elated and sharing jokes, the group from Yamanomura return to their dressing room, leaving the kami in the safety of the temple for a few hours. Back in the tatami room they eat, drink beer and sake and rest, contemplate the morning's events or sleep. Stretched out on the floor, the tengu troll lies snoring next to Okame, the peasant girl. Over in the corner Hyottoko, the whistling man, raises a glass with a couple of flute players. A few other men sit in a circle on the floor discussing the day’s events loudly. The village’s Shinto priest, who after leaving the deity for a few hours, clearly feels an uncommon sense of freedom and blusters wildly over his sake cup with some other villagers. The jokes get cruder as time goes by and the foreigner feels the need to go back to the temple for a couple of hours to see some more shishi performances from other villages. In the afternoon Morimo shishi again performs on the stage in front of the temple, the Yamanomura kami is then escorted back into the mikoshi and carried back to the assembly hall by its attendants. On the way there, shishi dances in front of the small shops or at the entrances to homes along the street. People give cash gifts in white envelopes in return for blessings that will protect them from misfortune and illness and provide purification and security. When they return they get changed and work together picking up their belongings, packing and tidying up before returning up the winding mountain road to Yamanomura. Everyone is tired and a few are not entirely sober. Another round of jokes and coarse innuendoes starts up, but the air is filled with exhilaration and a sense of release.

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Back home in the village, the kami is returned to the small local temple where more than a hundred women and children are waiting. The men come to attention again when they pass beneath the torii. With blessed water the priest washes his hands and rinses his mouth before replacing the deity into its permanent home in the inner sanctuary of the temple in a formal but simple ceremony. Most of the villagers are here and those who remained in the village during the festival have been busy preparing a feast in the adjacent assembly hall. Everyone is smartly dressed and many people are wearing kimonos. The children romp and run around, but are not chastised today. Two elderly men who have overindulged the ‘nectar of the Gods’ perform their own personal version of the lion dance ending with both of them falling down the many temple steps into the courtyard below. Now the Morimo shishi is dancing on its home ground and onlookers/participants line the roads to watch. Space is limited and there is only a small area in front of the temple altar for the lion’s rampage. The children are delighted, and the adults are both serious and carefree as they breathe in the scent the shishi has carried back from a much larger assembly. CHINESE JIERI – CELEBRATION WITH GODS AND DEMONS FOR HEALTH AND PROTECTION In China, when looking at the tradition of jieri, which is the most common term for festival events in national as in local contexts, the most common and obvious are parades and performances in connection with the Spring Festival and the Lantern Festival during China’s traditional New Year celebrations held annually during the first months of the year (according to the Western calendar) and determined by the moon. In some places deities are invited to watch over performances and in other places audiences can watch divine beings take form through sketches and dance. It is the peak season for travelling theatre troupes who perform difangxi (local theatre), traditional forms of theatre with strong ties to the community. Over the vast country, where still huge areas are not easily accessible, many festival events include ceremonies, rituals and performing arts aiming to create a platform linking reality and fantasy. In these shexi (‘earth/ground theatre’, given during festival events as offering to the gods of nature) or nuoxi (‘exorcist theatre’) it is

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possible to confront things or beings that are usually unfathomable or frightening. ‘Birthday of mankind’ with exorcist theatre A gentle, dense drizzle seems to strip the countryside of its contours in the farming district outside the city of Guishi, just south of the Yangzi River in the southern Anhui Province. It is February 3 and the middle of the traditional New Year celebration in 1998, bringing in the Year of the Tiger. Today is the seventh day, the ‘birthday of mankind’ and ten days of festivities around the region are about to begin. Various deities are involved in this intense period of celebration through theatre and dance with elements of worship or exorcism. The festivities culminate in the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first month of the new year. In the village of Chaxiwangcun the people greeting us are friendly and inquisitive. Some men are standing and talking outside a centrally located building with an open doorway flanked by double wooden doors. There is a festive atmosphere and we catch a glimpse of candlelight in the dim windowless room beyond the open doorway. The smell of incense slowly spreads through the air. The structure is a combination of a storage space for the portable shrine (longting) and a simple platform stage where plays will be performed to entertain both humans and gods. Longting (dragon palace or dragon pavilion) is made of lacquered wood. It is a couple of square metres in size and has several storeys or shelves, used to store theatrical masks and musical instruments. Surrounding the portable shrine are wooden stands with streamers and banners and replicas of traditional weapons such as lances, combat canes and halberds. Men and boys are bearing trays with offerings compiled according to strict rules and including meat, fish, vegetables, soybean curd (doufu), eggs and rice spirit, with the compulsory lucky red paper decorations. In the afternoon people enjoy the festive meal in their homes and as darkness begins to fall, the bang of a firecracker is heard through the drizzle from the area in front of the stage and the portable shrine. A second bang soon follows and after a few minutes the third one signals the start of the procession that will welcome the deity of the earth. Men and boys hurry along the raised trails between the alternating dry or waterlogged fields to participate in the procession.

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The women prepare their homes to welcome the deities. The trays of food and drink are placed in front of the entrances of each house, a small straw torch is lit and firecrackers are set up. Outside the theatre, children and adults set off long rows of firecrackers and they look around and laugh as the bluish smoke hangs in the air. Firecrackers have long been used as a means of protection against wild animals, to ward of evil, demonic forces and illness and for general purification purposes. In a few minutes everyone has gathered and the men who will carry the dragon pavilion are dressed in blue and red silk trousers and matching jackets with red headbands. The children carry colourful streamers and banners with the words Nuoshen da hui (Meeting the deity who drives away illness and plague) and huibi (Drive away). They join the procession behind the dragon pavilion which is carried by four men. Two older men will perform the ceremony and pass on the invitation to the deity. One of them carries a san, a colourful strip of fabric tied at one end to a thick wooden pole resembling an umbrella. The procession silently makes its way along the raised paths between the rice fields a few hundred meters to a place where three flat rocks lie in the middle of a field. One of the villagers tells me that the magnificent tree that once marked the spot is now gone leaving only the rocks to show the place where men and deities can meet. The dragon pavilion is placed on the ground close to the rocks and both of the men light incense and a candle as they kneel to recite a prayer. The umbrella-like san stands upright, leaning against one of the men’s shoulders. Suddenly the man stands up and furiously waves the umbrella round and round and up and down in a sweeping motion, while the other sets off a powerful firecracker. Suddenly the entire area is exploding with fireworks. The initial qingshen (deity invitation) is complete and the deity has arrived and is welcomed and celebrated by the two hundred villagers. In just a moment the atmosphere has changed from one of calm anticipation to exhilaration, festivity and joy. The procession is led by the san bearer, who furiously swings his umbrella. Behind him is longting, followed by spectators who have joined the procession. After a short walk over the fields, the procession reaches the narrow village road that leads between the houses up to the stage. The fireworks reach a climax and it now seems as though san is guiding the way and the man underneath is merely a puppet, barely able to

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hold on. Light, colour and banging and crackling sounds all make for an exhilarated and ecstatic atmosphere. The fabric strip umbrella has become the link with the sought-after deities and the objects in the portable shrine possess their spirits. Over the next nine days the deities will be entertained with plays, dancing and music. At the same time mythological and historical figures will be portrayed on stage. The performances take place regardless of how many villagers come to watch, but the entire village is united in appreciation of the encounters that are taking place. When the procession reaches the building where the performance will take place, the dragon pavilion is put back in front of the simple platform stage made of wooden planks, and the umbrella continues to swirl around with the man in tow. An altar is set up to the right of the stage. Red candles in an iron stand are lit and in front of the altar there is a fire in which the villagers begin burning pieces of white paper and lighting their own rows of firecrackers. On an extension to the stage above the altar is a rectangular wooden platform known as shenkan (divine alcove). The interior of the dragon pavilion becomes visible, revealing the musical instruments and the 24 masks that will be used for the performance. The man who was in charge of the ceremonies out in the fields unceremoniously takes out two gongs, cymbals and a drum and gives these to the musicians who immediately sit down to the left of the stage and start to play. The masks are placed in a special order on the platform in front of the altar. The crackling sound of the fireworks grows more intense and deafening. To me this is more like a visit to hell rather than a way to greet the benevolent forces. When one of the important men of the village tries to persuade people to set off their firecrackers outside in the courtyard, he is totally ignored by the men with happy, smiling faces and intense concentration who begin by burning white paper, fall to their knees in front of the alter and then set off the hundreds of firecrackers attached to red ribbon that they have brought with them. The atmosphere is one of elation despite the fact that our ears are ringing and everyone is coughing and gasping for breath in the blue smoke that now lies thick in the air inside the ‘theatre’ building. By attending the ceremonies and placing offerings by the alter, people hope that their families will avoid disease, that sons will be born, that the harvest will be good, and that they will enjoy happiness and prosperity in the coming year.

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There is no clear transition in the festivities between ceremonies, theatre and dance, just as it is impossible to distinguish between people’s roles as spectators and participants. Amid the exhilarated atmosphere there is also room for the commonplace, and events take place on different spheres; the deities are entertained and at the same time take part in the theatrical performance. The masks are the connecting link that now both represent and are permeated by the deities, while at the same time entertaining them. The music leads the way and the men who portray characters with the help of masks and costumes have prepared themselves for this by keeping themselves pure through sexual abstinence, food restrictions and bathing since New Year’s Eve. Like at an intimate family celebration, one activity flows into another without following a set programme. Each individual from the village’s 40 households uses this occasion to contact and pass on their desires to the deities and mythical figures that are part of the event through dance and theatre. Shortly after midnight the play suddenly ends and we make our way out onto the long muddy path through the village that leads to a bigger road where our car is parked. Suddenly we hear a single rhythmic gong from across the rice field and a lantern moves quickly through the dense darkness. The deity from the field is being escorted swiftly back to its dwelling place by the three rocks. BENGALI MELA – WORLDLY AND DEVOTIONAL GATHERINGS, DIVINE CONNECTIONS OR PENANCE In Bengal (divided since 1947 and nowadays known as the Indian state West Bengal and Bangladesh) the festival situation has a strong religious or spiritual attachment but still shows both similarities and differences to the festival events mentioned earlier in this essay. The expressions of the vast tradition are highly differentiated. The word utsab, originally from the Sanskrit (utsava), indicates a formal and ceremonious festival event, while the more commonly used mela includes all kinds of celebrations, performances and is also usually attached to an extensive fair. Furthermore, lokranjan (entertainment for people) would indicate a more loosely arranged festival with a touch of pleasure. Ceremonies and rituals performed regularly for the vast pantheon of Hindu gods called puja are often strongly performative or include performance aspects. Examples of this include Durga puja och

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Kali puja, both having big celebrations over many days annually in autumn, and including offerings of dance and theatre, among other things. Nobody would consider using the word ‘festival’ for these celebrations, however. The same goes for the main worship of the Hindu god Siva (Shiva), whose devotees pierce themselves with iron hooks, accompanied by song, music, dance and sketches, without loosing a drop of blood during the three-day event Sivaratri (Shivas night). An example parallel to this is the sufi utsab, dhamail (serving the god) or mela featuring devotional gatherings with music, song and dance continuing around the clock for several days and nights, and with the participants often going into a trance at the time of the last night's climax, ending with a fire dance. Another example is the mourning of the Shia Muslims during the Ashura, which includes selfpunishment in performative events in streets and at holy places, sometimes in addition to reciting and acting out the sad story about Imam Hosain before an audience. For Bengal’s bauls – itinerant singers and songwriters who, with their dogma-free lifestyle hold a unique position in the region – the large or small gatherings, meetings, festivals or parties known as mela play a major role in their lives, along with pilgrimages to places associated with holy graves and respected masters. Often on these occasions people also take the opportunity to carry out before an audience the simple rituals that, for a baul, are equivalent to a wedding. Sufi gathering with dance on fire in a Bangladeshi village The full moon hangs above the treetops like a ripe fruit. It is midnight in Shimuliya village in the beginning of February 2001 and the dhamail festival, which lasts three days and nights, is reaching its climax. The village lies close to the Padma River and, although it is less than a couple of hours south of Dhaka, it lacks electricity, telephones and all other modern conveniences. The majority of the villagers have a Sufistic approach to life and it is therefore appropriate that the annual Sufi festival is held here by the famous shrine that was built in honour of the saint Bari Shah. Spiritual leaders and teachers have gathered around the grave and are blessing the thousands of visitors who have travelled here on foot along the narrow gravelled

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road leading from the bigger country road a couple of kilometres away. The mazar is located in the centre of the village surrounded by a number of smaller graves, all extravagantly decorated with beautiful pieces of fabric, flowers and sweets. There is a pleasant, fresh fragrance from the perfumed water people constantly sprinkled over them. The most important master, Hatem Fakir, tells fragmented stories about Bari Shah who came to this area at the end of the 1800s owning nothing but the clothes he was wearing and a two-stringed dutara, which he played often. There are numerous mystical tales about his life and how he received sharp criticism for his songs and music by fundamentalists in the area who wanted to stop him. Hatem Fakir talks enthusiastically as if referring to a person who is still living. Leaning against a large tree in the village’s central point are seven 3-4 metre long bamboo poles wrapped in fabric of various colours. They will soon play an important role along with the singing and dancing, which will increase in intensity as the full moon reaches its highest point. The poles have strong symbolic value and the colours symbolise people’s ripu – weaknesses and desires which we must try to rid ourselves of through purification. Dancers and singers walk in a procession to the houses in the village for three days carrying the bamboo poles, which are also believed to bestow blessings upon the villagers for good health and the power to ward off illness and misfortune. The singing and dancing men continue tirelessly all through the days. They refrain from eating meat and fish and must walk around barefoot as shoes are not permitted during this time. The experienced group leader, Jabbar Ali, strikes a small gong and has the role as the main singer. The songs are about the Creator – the wholly immaculate one, and about everything we mortals should be grateful to Him for. Other songs tell of bodily functions and universal connections, and how we should live in order to keep our minds and bodies sufficiently pure so that we can get in touch with the highest force of creation. Men and women join the procession for mental and physical purification. On the afternoon of the third day, the singers and dancers are clearly very weary after the long drawn-out procession period during which they have been building their confidence and convincing

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themselves that, under the full moon of the final night, they will be able to dance in the fire and on the glowing embers, coming out entirely unscathed. A platform stage for the baul performances that will take place in the evening and into the night is erected at the side, and a little further from the shrine, beyond the spot where the bauls will perform, people prepare a circular space under a large tree for the dancers by levelling off the thin layer of gravel. Earth is mixed with water and spread out to dry in the sun. A small raised edge is created around the space to mark the boundary, and the area is then enclosed with a rope. After midnight Hatem Fakir arrives with the seven dancers who have been carrying the bamboo poles around the village during the day. The moon has risen and is now hanging like a fireball over the area, bathing it in moonlight. Hatem Fakir and the dancers will perform the fire dance and then others, also convinced of their resistance to the fire and glowing embers, will be permitted to enter the dance space. The fire is prepared by placing long, dry branches in the centre of the circle together with a one-taka coin, and adding a couple of betel leaves, mustard oil, ghi made from melted butter, grass, milk, mango tree shoots and rice. The rice symbolises food and is also thrown to the east, west, south and north to ask for all to be well in the future. Once the pile of branches begins to burn, Hatem Fakir walks around the fire concentrating on reading a mantra, while the seven men dance in an outer circle. After almost half an hour, the fire begins to die down, the flames become smaller and the branches are transformed into glowing charcoal. Hatem Fakir walks into the fire. The seven bamboo-pole dancers quickly follow and they all dance for a few minutes. At the same time, about ten younger men prepare themselves with exercises in concentration and then stand in a circle with their arms around each other’s waists. They move in their ring formation towards the glowing charcoal, shouting and dancing together on the embers for a couple of minutes. What is left of the embers and ash is then swept into a basket and taken to Bari Shah’s shrine. When they arrive there, the dancers fall to the ground before the shrine in an act of prayer and invocation. A couple of them are in such a powerful trance that they must be supported by other men standing nearby. They repeat partially recognisable words and phrases over and over without pausing. Cymbals and drums accompany their invocation

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as tears stream down the men’s cheeks. Songs and prayers blend as they reach a state of ecstasy to achieve the desired meeting with the divine one – who exists in their own hearts. Many of the participating spectators are carried away by the situation. They are tightly packed around the men who danced in the fire, wearing expressions of intense delight and trust. Another dancer falls into a trance and must be carried away to be cared for by the older, more experienced villagers. He is unresponsive as he hangs lifelessly in the arms of the three men who are carrying him. The soft skin under the soles of his feet shines without so much as a scratch. Agannritto, the fire dance, is over for this year. Its power and impact is hard for an outsider to comprehend. Festival of mourning in Kolkata By morning on March 2004 the streets and the railway bridge by Sealdah Station are already lined with tens of thousands of expectant spectators. The broad Chandra Bose Road and the intersecting Gandhi Road are closed for normal traffic and there is an occasional truck decorated with streamers and tinsel and loaded with young men calling out as the truck is driven back and forth at full speed. Police security is heavy and the white-clad officers are keeping the crowd under strict control, well aware that any slight relaxation on their part could have serious consequences. The asphalt is scorching hot, but all of the faithful festival participants walk barefoot and the soles of their feet are clearly badly burned. Tankers are spraying the streets with water to cool it off a little. Rows of trucks stop at regular intervals to hand out fruit drinks and rice water to both procession participants and spectators. This is not only to quench people’s thirst, but is also a symbolic act to remind them how fortunate they are to be able to drink their fill and of the Karbala Massacre of 680, when Hosain and his faithful followers were surrounded and left to die of thirst. The heat grows more intense and the route becomes more packed with people when the parade of self-scourging and mourning Shia Muslims that started a couple of kilometres north of here approaches. The streets are now lined with a large crowd of spectators who outwardly seem to represent a number of different religions. Thousands of people are participating in the parade with their elaborately decorated horses.

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Boy that followed the mourning march in Kolkata March 2004. Photo by the author.

Most of the men are wearing long white shirts that are soaked with drying blood because they have been cutting themselves along the route with knife blades tied together. The parade is several kilometres long and I understand that more than a thousand groups from different workplaces and institutes from Kolkata or who have travelled here from other parts of India are represented. There are some women in the procession too; most of them with scarves or shawls on their heads, and only a few wearing the burqa covering their whole body. Nearly all of the groups have a horse representing Hosain’s horse, which returned without its rider after he became a martyr. Extravagantly adorned horses are honoured with gifts and their coats are wiped with milk and water. The atmosphere is heated and fierce and there is a sense of danger, although no aggression is directed towards the crowd. It is wise, however, not to get in the way of the self-scourging men who stand with their legs wide apart in order to keep their balance as they toss the knives back and forth and from side to side against their backs. They cry out rhythmically, and every time the knives hit their bodies, new bleeding wounds appear, creating pools of blood along the street. Ecstatically and without restraint, they continue cutting themselves while moving around erratically. The street is totally jammed and the spectators are thrown this way and that. An ambulance with deafening sirens blaring tries to get through the crowd with a seriously injured person inside. The festive atmosphere suddenly gets a scary overtone and soon more sirens are heard from other directions. Looking down from a bridge, the scene is a dramatic

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one: wailing women and men in tight groups of ten to fifteen, horses and self-scourging men of various ages slowly heading away from the main street over the railway bridge and continuing towards the final destination, the Karbala Dam. The entire event is as much a religious rite as a profane spectacle, as much a supplication as a public production. The procession passes by slowly and the street becomes more and more stained with blood and horse manure, which mix with the pools of water left by the tankers. Flowers and colourful ribbons that have fallen from costumes and decorations are trampled into the street dirt as bright reminders of the transience of life, the closeness of beauty and ugliness, between life and death. Everyone is suffering from heat and thirst. Youths with blood running down their chests and over their hands, from the sleeves of the long shirts that were once white, accept bottles of water from the surrounding spectators to pour over their heads and faces. The crowd moves in the direction of the Karbala Dam and the giant prayer tent there. The dam’s calm waters become stained red when the procession of participants immerse themselves fully clothed into the water to wash off the blood. Then they sit inside or close to the prayer tent to listen to the detailed descriptions of the events at Karbala, the songs of mourning, readings and wailing. The holy men, storytellers and singers weep as they perform, as does their audience. The atmosphere here is calm and peaceful, permeated by sorrow and sadness like the aftermath of a devastating battle. CONCLUSION – FESTIVAL EVENTS FOR IDENTITY, AFFINITY AND COMMUNICATION In an essay that is limited in length such as this one, it is not possible to include a sufficient number of the countless festivals that are held annually in the countries in question. Not only is the geographic area vast, but the culture, languages and circumstances vary greatly within each of the countries. Discussing and analysing the entire spiritual and religious festival culture with the help of just one or two illustrative examples from each country may therefore seem an impossible task. Interestingly enough, however, there are not only differences, but also similarities, making some cautious generalisations about these events possible.

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The culture of festivals and the associated performative events must be seen in a contextual light, where even the invisible recipients and spiritual performers are taken seriously. The significance of a vibrant performing arts element in these societies is especially evident during festivals, which present the opportunity for artists to interact with the crowds of spectators in both performing and experiencing the realms of theatre and dance or other performative elements. Indigenous sources often use a more generous, less restrictive definition of the festival tradition than do their foreign counterparts. In Japan, although most of the matsuri are local events or are visited by people from within a limited area, a few are nationally or even internationally known, and are therefore personal events for the participants as well as tourist attractions, sometimes on a grand scale. Analyses include ideas about the inherent potential or fundamental energy of the matsuri and about how these events do not merely exist for the purpose of carrying out rituals in temples and shrines (Kurabayashi Shôji 1979: 130). Matsuri are seen as a fundamental and integrated aspect of the cultural life of Japan, and as such are inseparable from the Japanese people’s origins, development and realisation of their current situation, concluded in a perception of matsuri as bunka no haha (the mother of culture). The present situation in China has been shaped by political developments in the country in the 1900s when, during some extremist periods, all traditional, spiritual or religious festival celebrations were banned. This meant that traditions were not able to survive in a natural way. However, following the change to a political climate of openness at the end of the last century, the celebrations were quickly resumed throughout the country. In China’s remote and still hard-to-reach rural areas, many types of performance are used to contact the spirits of nature to show appreciation, receive help or seek guidance. The gods linked to the earth, water or mountains are honoured and the actual contact is entirely or partially facilitated by the use of music, song, dance and theatre, often in combination. In a book on Chinese Festivals in Hong Kong, the author summarises the nature of the events in a very natural way: ‘All festivals are similar to this one that I attended. The main aim is to honour the gods or the ancestors. People offer worship and opera performances and in return they ask for guidance and good fortune. However, the rites of each festival are different.’ 2

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The detailed examples from Bangladesh and India illustrate events where there is an explicit and powerful belief in a higher power and in ancestors, with links to Sufism and Islam. The bloody processions, self-scourging and the interpretations of the suffering of the martyrs in Kolkata become a form of collective penance for the common legacy of responsibility involving endurance of pain and torment. The public festival attains a theatrical expression linking it to the public traditions in the birthplace of Islam, as well as to the original customs and religious practices that existed in Bengal before the Muslims arrived. Together these traditions become a powerful expression of emotion with a firmly established belief in being a participant in an historic event. In a conclusion such as this, one must raise the critical question of whether it is possible to analyse festivals in different cultures using the same theoretical models. Another inevitable discussion is the relationship between ritual and festivity. These questions are too far reaching to discuss in depth in this format; however, a number of general, common points come to the fore.3 Festival events can be seen as prime devices for promoting social cohesion and integrating individuals into a society or a group, and retaining them as members through shared, reinforcing performance. Another aspect is that a festival is based on sharing in some way a common cultural idiom. Though one can also agree that changes occur constantly, and that no matter the structure or intent, or how seemingly wild and unstructured they appear, festivals need some organising sinews to hold them together (Ashkenazi 1993: 145). The multifaceted forms of expression associated with festival events invite different theoretical points of departure and analysis, both within the countries and among foreign observers. According to my experiences and understanding, the kind of festival events discussed here involve the whole community, reflecting a sense of the relationship between the physical and the spiritual as a collective memory. I would prefer to summarise the importance of the festival events being examined with a religious-scientific overtone, quoting the functional aspects emphasised by a Japanese author: ‘One analyses the nature of the social group supporting the festival in order to find the role in the lives of the people; [the festival event is] viewed for its role in integrating the hearts and minds of the people, or giving them a spiritual sense of unity’ (Yanagawa Keiichi 1988: 5).

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NOTES 1

This essay is based on more than 20 years of research into theatre, dance, popular performances and festival culture, including extensive field studies in the region. The situations in China and Japan are described in Gastar Generaler och Gäckande Gudinnor. Resande teatersällskap, religiösa festivaler och populära nöjen i dagens Japan och Kina (Stockholm, Carlssons, 2000), forthcoming in English in 2005 with the title: Ghosts, Generals and Gorgeous Goddesses. Travelling theatre troupes, religious festivals and popular amusement in contemporary Japan and China. My research on India and Bangladesh was published in 2006 (Stockholm, Carlssons) in Swedish under the title Brokiga Bengalen. Resande teatersällskap, religiösa festivaler och populära nutida nöjen i indiska Västbengalen och Bangladesh. 2 Joan Law Mae Nar in the Preface of Barbara E. Ward and Loan Law, Chinese Festivals in Hong Kong (China, no place of publication or publisher, 1995, 1993), p. 11. 3 These points are discussed in relation to international research on festivals based on a broader approach and a more anthropological one in Michael Ashkenazi, Matsuri Festivals in a Japanese Town (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1993), p. 145 ff.

REFERENCES Ashkenazi, M. (1993) Matsuri Festivals in a Japanese Town, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kurabayashi S. (1979) Nihin no matsuri. Kokoro to kata. Tokyo: Sufuno Tomosha. Nygren, C. (2000) Gastar Generaler och Gäckande Gudinnor. Resande teatersällskap, religiösa festivaler och populära nöjen i dagens Japan och Kina, Stockholm: Carlsson. Ward, B. E. & Loan Law (1995, 1993) Chinese Festivals in Hong Kong, China. (No place of publication or Publisher)

THE FEAST OF SAINT NICHOLAS IN THE LOW COUNTRIES PETER EVERSMANN

One probably does not directly associate a traditional children’s feast with a (theatrical) festival. Still, a case could be made to designate the Dutch celebration of the feast of St Nicholas as a community festival – a clearly demarcated period with a festive character in which numerous performances and theatrical events take place and in which, moreover, a large part of the population is involved: young and old, from all social classes and denominations, both as performers and audience. In addition one could view the entire festival as one theatrical event and the central figure in this festival, St Nicholas, as the key ‘dramatic character’, requiring specific artistic skills from the performer who interprets him and a specific kind of theatrical environment. In order to give substance to these claims and to clarify the specific form that the notion of ‘festival’ takes in this case, this contribution will look first at the way the feast is celebrated in the Netherlands. The second part then tries to consider some of the aspects that allow us to talk about the nominal celebrant in the festival, the figure of St Nicholas, a real person who had been the bishop of Myra, a town near the city of Anatolia in present-day Turkey, in the 4th century A.D., as a “dramatic character” – and in a sense the protagonist – in a highly theatrical event and possibly also the (metaphoric) catalyst for everything that occurs. CELEBRATING ST NICHOLAS1 The feast of St Nicholas, (or Sinterklaas, as he is also called in Dutchspeaking countries), is an annual event which has been uniquely Dutch and Flemish for centuries. St Nicholas’ Feast Day, December 6th, is observed in most Roman Catholic countries primarily as a feast for small children. But it is only in the Low Countries – and especially in the Netherlands – that the eve of his feast day (December 5th) is celebrated nationwide by young and old, Christian and non-Christian, and – certainly today – without any religious overtones. Although St Nicholas is always portrayed in the vestments of the bishop he once

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Saint Nicholas is welcomed by the mayor of Texel with her chain of office, 2004. Photo by the author.

was, his status as a canonised saint has little to do with how the Dutch nowadays perceive this ‘good holy man’. Rather, he is a kind of benevolent old character, whose feast day is observed by exchanging gifts and making good-natured fun of each other by means of home made satirical poetry and surprises (see below). But let us go back a little and start at the beginning, around three weeks before December 5th. As every child in the Netherlands knows, this is the time when St Nicholas gets ready to leave his castle in Spain in order to travel to Holland. Exactly why St Nicholas lives in that far away country is a mystery, but that is what all the old songs, nursery rhymes and children’s books say. Some authors explain this by suggesting that originally the saint might have been introduced to the Dutch by Spanish sailors, others maintain more secular reasons (such as a pleasant climate), while yet others suppose there is a link with the eighty-year-war of the Protestant Dutch against the Catholic Spaniards (1568-1648). Whatever the case may be, according to the children’s books the saint spends most of the year somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula – recording the behaviour of all children in a big red book, while his helpers the Zwarte Pieten (or ‘Black Peters’) stock up on presents for his next visit. Then, in November, St Nicholas gets on his white horse Amerigo, the Pieten load the huge sacks full of gifts in the hold, and all of them board the steamer that will bring them to the Netherlands. A few days later they arrive in a harbour town – a different one every year – where they are formally greeted by the mayor and a delegation of citizens. Their docking and the subsequent parade through the town are watched live on television by the whole country and mark the beginning of the ‘St Nicholas season’. In the following week they arrive in a lot of other cities, by boat if possible but sometimes by other means. In Amsterdam the Saint and his helpers dock near the central railway station in front of the Nicholas Church and are saluted by gunshots fired by the army. Then

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Saint Nicholas parade, Amstelveen 2006. Photo by the author.

a big parade is formed with brass bands, mounted wagons, Zwarte Pieten, motor-police, dancers, live exotic animals (camels and elephants from the Zoo) and so on, culminating in St Nicholas arriving on a white horse with a regiment of lancers to protect him. The parade winds through the heart of the city, while the Pieten give candy to the children and their parents who line the route – all other traffic is diverted. At Damsquare, in the very centre of the town, St Nicholas is formally greeted by the mayor with his chain of office who, at least till the 1970s, even used to hand him the keys of the town. The parade ends at the municipal theatre, where the Saint appears one more time on the balcony before having a session inside with especially invited kids. As such, this ceremonial entry of St Nicholas into the city is clearly reminiscent of all kinds of comparable events with public parades – entries of heads of state, conquering princes or generals, sportsmen and so on – with the provision that the main character here is both real (for the small children) and fictive (for the parents). From the time that they arrive the old bishop and his helpmates are really busy. At night they ride across Holland's rooftops and St

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Nicholas listens through the chimneys to check on the children's behaviour. His helpers, the Pieten, jump down the chimneys – or enter the house in another miraculous way – and make sure that the carrot or hay the children have left for the horse in their shoes by the fireplace (or, nowadays, by the central heater or just the window) is exchanged for a small gift or some candy. Often he can also pick up a beautiful drawing that the children have made or a list with the presents they wish to have on December 5th. During the day St Nicholas and his Pieten are even busier, visiting schools, hospitals, department stores, restaurants, offices and many private homes. The Pieten ring doorbells, scatter sweets through the slightly opened doors [doors left slightly ajar?] and leave basketfuls of presents by the front door. How do they manage to be all over the Netherlands at once? This is thanks to the so-called ‘hulp-Sinterklazen’, or St Nicholas helpers, who dress up like the bishop and the Black Peters and help them perform their duties. Children who become wise to simultaneous ‘Sint-sightings’ and start to doubt his real existence are told that, since St Nicholas indeed cannot be in two places at once, he gets a little help from his uncanonised friends. SURPRISES, CANDY AND POEMS During the three weeks before December 5th a lot of the Dutch are quite busy too – shopping for and, more importantly, making presents. Tradition demands that all packages that will be exchanged on St Nicholas eve must be camouflaged in some imaginative way, and that every gift be accompanied by a fitting poem. This is the essence of St Nicholas: lots of fun on a day when people are not only allowed, but expected, to make fun of each other in a friendly way. The older children, parents, teachers, employers and employees, friends and coworkers tease each other and make fun of each others’ habits and mannerisms. So part of the tradition is how the presents (in Dutch they are called ‘sur-pree-sus’; but the word is spelled the same way as the French ‘surprises’) – are hidden or disguised. Receivers of the presents often have to go on a treasure hunt all over the house, aided by hints, to look for them. They must be prepared to dig their gifts out of the potato bin, to find them in a jelly pudding, in a glove filled with wet sand, in some crazy dummy or doll, etc. Working hard for your

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presents and working even harder to think up other peoples’ presents and get them ready is what the feast is all about. The original poem accompanying each present is another old custom and a particularly challenging one. Here the author has a field day with his subject (the recipient of the gift). Foibles, love interests, embarrassing incidents, funny habits and well-kept secrets are all fair game. The recipient, who is the butt of the joke, has to open his/her parcel in public and read the poem aloud amid general hilarity. The real giver is supposed to remain anonymous, because all presents technically come from St Nicholas, and recipients say out loud ‘Thank you, St Nicholas!’, even if they no longer believe in him. Towards December 5th St Nicholas poems pop up everywhere in the Netherlands: in the press, in school, at work and even in both Houses of Parliament. On the day of the 5th, most places of business close a bit earlier than normal. The Dutch head home to a table laden with the same traditional sweets and baked goods eaten for St Nicholas as shown in the 17th-century paintings of the Old Masters. Often the gathering is larger than just one household: other family members or friends join in. Large chocolate letters – the first initial of each person present – serve as place settings. They share the table along with large baked cookie dolls made from ‘speculaas’ – the American versions of which are known as ‘windmill cookies’ and ‘gingerbread men’ depending on their shapes. Other traditional foods include mulled wine, ‘pepernoten’ (ginger nuts), a special kind of chocolate fondant called ‘breastplate’ and marzipan. In anxious anticipation some of the traditional St Nicholas songs are sung. Then suddenly there is a loud banging on the door, a black hand appears and throws more sweets across the room, but when you look in the hallway to see who is there, Black Peter himself is gone but he has left a big basket full of presents. Another scenario – if you’re very lucky – is that St Nicholas accompanied by two of his Zwarte Pieten comes to visit you himself and has a conversation with each of the children – showing how remarkably well he knows everything about their strengths and weaknesses, all of which are written down in his book. He then asks the children to sing for him and hands out some of the presents personally. He can of course not stay long… there are other kids that have to be attended to, but he leaves the rest of the presents.

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Then one takes turns unwrapping the gifts and reading the poems out loud so that everyone can enjoy the impact of the ‘surprise’. The emphasis for the elderly is thereby on originality and personal effort rather than on the commercial value of the gift. The younger children still do get surprises and poems (but shorter, simple ones that are read by their parents), but for them the feast is a bit more ‘commercial’, often culminating in at least one ‘big’ present that is their heart’s desire. THE ST NICHOLAS FESTIVAL AS AN ARTISTIC EXPERIENCE The description of the feast and the many ways in which it is celebrated (in schools, children’s hospitals, at work, etc.) can be elaborated upon, but these are more or less the fundamentals. From them the specific character of this theatrical ‘festival’ becomes clear: during a longer period that is clearly marked by a beginning and an end there are countless theatrical ‘productions’ around the same theme – even with more or less the same characters. These events are both public and more or less coordinated on a grander scale (the parade, a daily television journal programme devoted to the activities of St Nicholas and the Zwarte Pieten, appearances in department stores), as well as more private (visits to homes, hospitals, companies, the family celebrating December 5th). However, the set-up ensures that there really is no spatial boundary for the festival – no specific festival ground or venue. Also there is no central agency responsible for the festival; there is not a manager or board of directors that can be held accountable for the proceedings – in this sense the festival is certainly anarchic, democratic and truly communal. And in many ways – in its diversity – it constitutes an overarching single theatrical event (see, for example, the introductory section on Theatrical events festivalised by Sauter, Schoenmakers and Hauptfleisch). The latter aspect comes even more to the fore when we ask the question why the St Nicholas celebration is a clear invitation for many people to become participating artists in a shared event. Even a cursory exploration from this perspective reveals some of the more intriguing features of this traditional feast. First of all, it is rather obvious that the term ‘performing’ (‘role playing’) applies here, since the feast involves quite a bit of theatrical playing by the adults and the older children. Furthermore, St Nicholas and his helpers require not only special costumes but rather elaborate

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make-up as well: wig, beard, moustache and ageing features for the bishop and blackening of the face plus lipstick and sometimes earrings for the Black Peters. Props are essential too: crosier and book for the old man, bag with sweets – and possibly a birch – for his helpers. In addition, those who do not impersonate the traditional characters themselves certainly have to play a ‘role’ also: the establishment of St Nicholas as a character, and the credibility of that characterisation, is dependent on, and greatly enhanced by, the nature of the environment created by the participants. The reverent behaviour that is owing to the holy bishop requires that both the adults and the older children who are ‘in the know’ play along and keep up appearances. So the acting, uitilising a great deal of improvisation but based on some fixed features and rules, really involves the majority of the community and not only the impersonators themselves. The rather complex intricacies of playing and watching St Nicholas become most apparent with the more private visits by St Nicholas. The roles of the Saint and the Black Peters are more or less fixed and codified: the actors have to adhere to their standardised fictional images and a house call normally progresses along much the same lines on every occasion. A host of children and adults have been expecting the visit and are gathered in the living room. The Saint’s entrance is marked by a measure of pandemonium with the Black Peters throwing around candy. Then Nicholas is reverently invited to a chair of honour – often decorated with festoons – while the Black Peters carry in the presents and make sure that the notes on the children (secretly slipped to them by the parents) are inserted in the big book they carry. At the request of St Nicholas everyone sings a welcoming song and then each of the young believers is called to come forward and have a little conversation with him. It is here that the improvisational qualities of the playing come to the fore most strongly. Based on the short notes of the parents, the Saint and his helpers engage in a dialogue with the children, inviting them to talk about themselves or some aspect of their lives (school, hobbies, sports, etc.). Often the young children are asked to sing a song or show a particular skill they possess (dancing, swim movements, judo throws and so on) – encouraged and helped to do this by a Black Peter. So, in a sense, these youngsters are also drawn into performing: in front of everyone they have to interact with St Nicholas and show him (and the rest of

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the company) what they are capable of. No wonder they are often a little shy and have to be helped along by one of the elders. At the end of each conversation St Nicholas then hands the child a present and the next one is called forward. Meanwhile the grown-ups watch (and photograph or video!) the event intensely: they are interested in the behaviour of the children and, at the same time, are judging how well St Nicholas and the Black Peters are performing their roles. But they’re not only watching: when St Nicholas asks them to become involved in the fiction – inviting them to sing along with their children, to tell stories from their own youth or even to sit on his lap – the code really leaves them no choice but to honour these requests, often to the delight of the other adults. The same goes more or less for the older children who don’t believe any more; they have to play along as well, but are often unsure as to how they should behave. Being new recent initiates they know that the situation is a fictional one, but have yet to become accustomed to their role. So, especially when they have just learned that the Saint and his helpers are not real, they focus, on the one hand, on how the playing is done and on how believable the acting is – looking to see whether they can discern that the Saint is wearing a wig or that Black Peter is wearing make-up – and, on the other hand, on how the adults behave in alternating role playing and spectatorship. For the actor portraying St Nicholas these children can be quite hard to involve, but a few well placed remarks and a little wink will often ensure that they too will play along convincingly. Finally, when all the children have had their turn, the Saint says goodbye again. He leaves the rest of the presents (and surprises!) to be unwrapped afterwards and departs to the tune of a final song by everyone. One of the adults sees him off and – in case of a ‘professional’ St Nicholas – makes sure that one of the Black Peters is getting the agreed fee. Besides the theatrical playing it is also clear that the St Nicholas feast turns quite a number of people into multi-disciplinary artists for a short time. It requires a lot of creativity in a variety of artistic fields from all the participants: the imaginative way in which one has to wrap up the presents and the literary skills involved in making poems that make fun of the receiver are not to be underestimated. It will be no big surprise that (with such a high output, often done under extreme pressures of meeting the deadline of December 5th) not all

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the works of St Nicholas can be said to be artistic masterpieces, to say the least. But however amateurish, it is an artistic process that takes place. However, there is also a sense in which St Nicholas can be considered not only to be a character in his own theatrical event and a catalyst to stimulate artistic creativity in the participants, but indeed, as also a historical-mythical presence. In other words: this collectively imagined figure is the driving spirit of the St Nicholas event and, through it, the catalyst for and originator of important artistic or even transcendental aesthetic experiences in the participants. This feature derives from the characteristic of works of art to invoke a new way of viewing the world in the receivers of the works. In that sense, experiencing art has often been described by such phrases as ‘the discovery of new insights’, ‘the shifting of belief systems’, ‘the recoding of our perceptions’, or even as ‘traumatic shock’, and so on. And exactly these qualifications certainly seem to apply when we look at what happens in the transitional process as children grow from firm believers in St Nicholas to non-believers as they move into adulthood. Just imagine how hard it is to let go of a belief system that is upheld and reinforced by so many things. First of all the tangible reality of everything: St Nicholas is really there, you can see and touch him, he is greeted with military honour, the television is serious about him and all the adults behave reverently in his presence. Besides he seems to know all about you and – what is probably the clinching argument – you also get all these nice presents from him – so of course you don’t want to jeopardise this most advantageous source of goodies. And finally: should you really come to the conclusion that your parents have been lying to you all the time? Surely, that is not imaginable. But yet, once a child reaches the age of 7 or 8, the magical view of the world is replaced with a more cognitive one – as Gardner2 and other child psychologists have described – and the child begins to doubt and ask questions. How is it possible to ride with a horse on gabled rooftops? How can Black Peter climb through the chimney? How is it possible that St Nicholas can be in several places at the same time? Why do my classmates get more (or fewer!) presents, etc. And inevitably there comes a time he or she really has to know – is St Nicholas real?

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The traumatising realisation of the truth is a strong theme in the works of a number of Dutch writers, who explore the often confusing, painful and sometimes even humiliating process of acknowledging to oneself that one has been duped for years and that things are not always what they seem to be. Yet, the blow is also softened during this process, because not only has one gained knowledge and understanding, but in a sense one is also entering the adult world. As such, losing one’s innocence in this matter could also be viewed as a kind of ‘rite of passage’. From now on the child is expected to play along with the game – conspiring on an even par with parents and older brothers and sisters – not betraying the secret to the younger children. And this entering into the adult community not only brings new responsibilities (from now on one has to join in with the activities and is expected to make funny presents and poems) but also new rewards – one of them undoubtedly being able to impersonate Black Peter – a role that a lot of the children are enthralled to play. As the crucial catalyst for this rite-of-passage experience that almost all the children undergo in some way or other, the St Nicholas festival in a way becomes a work of art, an experiential event which leads the participant on a voyage of (inner and outer) discovery, even as it fulfills its crucial and multiple communal functions in Dutch society. Besides the theatrical playing and the personal experience of both shock and enlightenment that are involved, the feast of the holy bishop is in a sense also establishing and shaping Dutch society. In providing a lot of people with a more or less comparable traumatic experience at quite an early age, the tradition becomes a sort of binding factor that is experienced and defended as typically Dutch. Even more so: there have been hints that what is commonly seen as a characteristic of the Dutch – namely a certain disdain for formalities, their anti-authoritarian attitude, their reluctance to acknowledge hierarchies – might at least in part be attributed to the theatrical character of St Nicholas. In other words: once you’ve learned to see through the costume of a holy saint, discovering that he’s just an ordinary man in disguise, it’s not so hard to see the same relativity in any other costume or uniform – be it that of a policeman, a soldier, or a judge.

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ST NICHOLAS IN HISTORY Historically, St Nicholas has been connected to the forging of Dutch society in another way. Of course the tradition as it is practised today is relatively new, actually an invention of the 19th century.3 In 1850 the school teacher Jan Schenkman (1806-1863) published an illustrated children’s book entitled Saint Nicholas and his Servant that became very popular in a short time. As such, it became one of the most influential shapers of the tradition and it was reprinted and reillustrated time and time again – even up to now, when some of the historical editions can be purchased as facsimiles. Schenkman added a few elements of his own that have become essential to the feast as it is celebrated nowadays: the steamer (at that time a wonderfully modern means of transportation), Spain as the country where Nicholas lives when not in Holland, and Black Peter as a helper who might also enforce punishment for children who have been bad – typically an invention of someone who had to maintain discipline in his class.4 In a way this publication established the nationwide tradition that is still upheld – and it is probably no coincidence that this came at a time when the Netherlands was being formed into a modern state. As an educational website devoted to Dutch history states: Before 1850 the celebration of St Nicholas was a little bit of a mess. Every city or village had its own St Nicholas feast […] and the Netherlands were not a real unity – people often not relating to the Nation but rather to their own region. This changed fast around 1850 – for example, through the new constitution of 1848. The feast of Saint Nicholas changed also. ([…]Through Schenkman’s illustrated book) everyone could see what the Saint was supposed to look like, where he came from and who was his servant. In that way St Nicholas helped a little with the unification of the Netherlands.5

The reshaping of St Nicholas in the midst of the 19th century was not the only time in history that the feast and the accompanying stories changed considerably. Like any mythical figure, St Nicholas does reflect his environment, adapting to the times and clearly being connected to the social and political context of those who honour him. A few examples can illustrate this. The origin of the feast in the Low Countries – and indeed in the whole of Western Europe – goes back to the Middle Ages. The popularity of St Nicholas got an enormous boost when his bones were stolen in 1087 from Myra and transported to Bari in Southern Italy.

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Arrival of Saint Nicholas. Note that Black Peter is depicted as a native from the colonies. (Source: Bos, F.G., Groot SintNicolaasboek: met toepasselijke gedichtjes Groningen: W.R. Casparie, ca. 1886)

Subsequently relics of the saint spread through Europe and with them his fame. In the north of France he became the patron saint of the school children – at that time concentrated within the cloister schools. On 5th December these students elected one of them as ‘bishop’, who then ruled till December 28 (Innocents day). Together with his fellow students he would play out events from the life of the real bishop in a theatrical way. Subsequently the feast was transferred to the outdoors where the ‘saint’ was surrounded by the other students dressed up as fearful devils roaming the streets with blackened faces. The citizens could only be released from these helpers by giving food or money.6 Seen from this angle, the feast of St Nicholas originally belonged to the feasts and rituals of the ‘topsy-turvy world’, with close ties to other December feasts and carnival – all with chosen temporary ‘kings’ who in their turn are heirs to the King of the Roman Saturnalia.7 But also other influences can also be discerned as having contributed to the Christian St Nicholas tradition – such as the pagan German figure of Wotan riding through the night air on his flying horse, accompanied by black ravens. When the Protestants came into power the Saint came under considerable pressure and in a relatively short time his feast was abolished in both England and Germany. Meisen concludes from Luther’s housekeeping books and his ‘Table conversations’ that the children of the reformer were still given presents on St Nicholas day

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around 1535, but ten years later they got them in the context of another feast, three weeks later at Christmas8 (Meisen 1931/1981: 26). In Holland in the 17th century St Nicholas was also banned by the government at the instigation of the Protestant clergy, who thought him too Catholic.9 But for some reason the feast of the Saint was more resilient in the Low Countries than in the rest of Europe. It went more or less underground and inspired the people to rebel. In 1663 the youths of Amsterdam even openly rioted, demanding their right to get presents and candy on St Nicholas eve – resulting in the government officially agreeing that one was allowed to celebrate St Nicholas once again – albeit not publicly but in the confines of one’s family – a rather typical pragmatic Dutch compromise.10 And the secular reinvention of the feast in the middle of the 19th century was not the last adaptation. In this respect the children’s books that have appeared since that time show remarkable changes whereby St Nicholas and Black Peter are less and less in the business of instailling fear in children by punishment and become more and more friendly, according to the new psychological and educational insights that positive reward is much more effective than repression.11 BLACK PETERS An interesting case is also Black Peter. From the medieval mock devil (the Black man) he later becomes an oriental Moorish servant, and it is only in the 19th century that there are clear associations with black African people. So from the carnivalesque figure of the trickster, Zwarte Piet became a black servant. With the influx of coloured immigrants in Dutch society and strong anti-discrimination sentiments from the 1960s onwards, there were serious questions raised about this image of the helper of St Nicholas: black, often not too smart, buffoonish, speaking mangled Dutch and in such a servile role. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s the debate raged quite fiercely (Helder & Gravenberch 1998: 42). For several people of colour the figure of Black Peter was clearly offensive and they related how in their childhood their classmates scolded them as dumb Zwarte Piet or teased them with having to go to Spain as Nicholas’s slave. As a result of the allegations of racism some attempts were made to give the Peters not black make-up, but paint their faces in an alternative colour or colours: for example, with one side of their face green and the other side yellow. The idea was that in this way nobody

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Saint Nicholas and Black Peter are taking bad children to Spain. (source: Schenkman, J. Sint Nikolaas en zijn knecht. Amsterdam: J. Vlieger, ca.1885)

could feel discriminated against. However, after a few years these experiments were more or less abandoned and now the Peters are generally back to black again – but so deep and shiny that even naturally black kids often apply the black make-up. Nevertheless the figure of Zwarte Piet has changed, but this has less to do with outward appearances than with modifying the function of this character and his relation to St Nicholas. This has, for example, led to portrayals of the pair in which the traditional roles are more or less reversed – Black Peter now being the hero, helping a St Nicholas who is old, forgetful, distracted and not really in touch with modern times. Or – in the storyline of the television broadcasts – there are certain threats endangering the arrival of the Saint and his being on time with all the presents, but it’s a resourceful Zwarte Piet who at the last moment saves the day, ensuring that the feast can go on as planned. ST NICHOLAS AND SANTA CLAUS With regard to the question of St Nicholas being a ‘grand’ theatrical character, one finally could point out that major characters in artistic works in history have tended to become the models for ensuing work, –adapted and changed to fit new circumstances and intentions. With St Nicholas this is clearly the case when one realizses that the (American) Santa Claus was inspired by him when Dutch settlers found their way to the New World in the 17th century.12 Hence the figure of Father Christmas overlaps markedly with the tradition from

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the Low Countries, although other European and Nordic elements come into play as well – including variations of Wotan, with reindeer and sleigh. As a result a tradition has evolved that can be said to be more secular and probably more commercial, and for the most part less tangibly real, than in the Netherlands (although nowadays St Nicholas is, of course, also carefully ‘marketed’ by the stores). After all, in America or England Santa Claus does not arrive each year on national television, nor is he formally greeted by the mayor. And although with Santa Claus sometimes a degree of impersonation and costuming is involved, on the whole the theatrical playing seems less developed and diversified than with St Nicholas – acknowledging openly that one is dealing with a person who is dressed up and who functions within the context of, and as an icon for, Christmas rather than someone with a feast of his own. Also the wrapping up of presents in a ‘surprise’ and the poems that make fun of the receiver have not survived – demanding less imaginative creativity from those who give each other presents in stockings or under the tree. Seen historically, it might be deemed quite ironic that nowadays in the Netherlands there seems to be a rivalry between the two figures and sometimes St Nicholas is in danger of losing ground to his English counterpart. Globalising tendencies in Western culture, a demanding society in which one is pressured for time, secularisation and commercialism, all favour the rise of the more easy-going guy from the North Pole and there seems to be a growing tendency to exchange St Nicholas for Santa Claus. But counter-forces run strong also – especially within elementary schools – and even a lot of nonChristian immigrants have wilfully embraced St Nicholas as beneficiary of small children (as well as an opportunity to poke goodnatured fun at each other). CONCLUSION In the above commentary several traits and characteristics of St Nicholas’ feast as festival and of the Saint himself as a theatrical character and catalyst have been have been sketchily discussed. As to the former, it became clear that the festival is widespread and clearly demarcated in time, with both public (parade, television), semi-public (department stores) and more private appearances of the main characters (schools, hospitals, homes, etc.). However this ‘festival’ is not confined to certain venues and also has no central

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agency responsible for the festivities; in that sense it is anarchic and communal– appealing to all social classes, age groups and even religious denominations. As to the performative importance of the St Nicholas character it should be remarked that the theatrical playing involved does not only pertain to the impersonators (complete with costumes, props and makeup), but also extends to the older children and grownups who reverently have to play along. Secondly, the important role of ‘surprises’ and poems should be noted, pointing to the multidisciplinary creativity that is demanded from the older participants. Then there is the discovery of the younger children that St Nicholas is not for real: a traumatic experience that nevertheless is also a rite of passage in the process of growing up. As such the feast of St Nicholas provides a binding factor that – historically as well as contemporaneously – contributes to the cultural identity of the Low Countries. It is therefore no surprise that the tradition has preChristian forerunners and has been involved in a continuous process of adaptation – reflecting the changes within the social context. In what form St Nicholas will survive is not clear. One thing is certain though: as with any such tradition, the feast depends upon its participants actively engaging in it. As long as the game is played and the figures of St Nicholas and Black Peter come to life each year, in a sense they can be said to be real. Or, as St Nicholas himself remarked when he was questioned about his ontological status: ‘I exist for those who believe in me’.13

NOTES 1

The description of the feast is partly based on the website of the Permanent Mission of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the United Nations: http://pvnewyork.org/about_the/general_information/holidays_and/dutch_traditions/ feast#feast. 2 Cf. Gardner, H. Art education and human development. Los Angeles: The Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1990. 3 This is generally accepted by all authors. For the invention of traditions and their link to national identities cf. also Hobsbawm, E.J. and Ranger, T. The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1983. How St Nicholas was acclaimed even more as typically Dutch during World War II is described by Jones, C.W., 1978 pp. 359-361. 4 It’s not certain whether Schenkman described actual practices or whether these were ‘invented’ after his publication. For example, Schenkman describes the entry of

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St Nicholas into the city and there is some scant evidence for such events actually being performed, but this is far from conclusive. The earliest firm record of an actual parade dates from 1888 – in the town of Venray. In Amsterdam a boat ride through the city was organised as early as 1927, but the entry that became famous and a kind of model for the rest of the country was organised from 1934 onwards. This parade enlarged after World War II – was televised each year until the national television broadcaster decided to organise the event itself – choosing a different city each year (cf. http://www.sint.nl/html/history/eersteintocht.html). 5 Website of Anno (Pieter de Dreu e.a., eds): http://www.anno.nl/anno/anno/i001421.html. 6 Cf. Trigt, Peter van 1995. Het Sint Nicolaasfeest en de traditie van de omgekeerde wereld. NRC Handelsblad, 24 November. Cit. in Helder & Gravenberch, 1998, p. 28. 7 Cf. Lévi-Strauss, ‘Father Christmas Executed’ in: Miller, D. (ed.) Unwrapping Christmas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, p. 46. 8 Meisen, K. Nikolauskult und Nikolausbrauch im Abendlande: eine kultgeographisch-volkskundliche Untersuchung. Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1931/1981, p. 26. 9 Typical examples of prohibitions in Dutch towns are given by Meisen, K., 1931/1981, pp. 28-31. One of these ordinances is partly translated by Jones, C.W., 1978: ‘Since the magistrates [of Amsterdam] have learned that in previous years, notwithstanding the publishing of the Bylaws, on Saint Nicholas Eve various persons have been standing on the Dam and other places in the town with candy, eatables, and other merchandise, so that a large crowd from all over town gathered…the same magistrates, to prevent all such disorders and to take the superstition and fables of the papacy out of the youths’ heads, have ordered, regulated, and opined that on Saint Nicholas Eve no persons, whoever they may be, are to be allowed on the Dam or any other places and streets within this town with any kind of candy, eatables, or other merchandise…[under penalty of very severe fines]’ pp. 330-1. 10 Cf.: http://www.anno.nl/anno/anno/i001419.html 11 A historical analysis of changes in educational notions and their relation to the St Nicholas customs is given by De Jager, 2001. Cf. also Helder & Gravenberch, 1998, p. 42. 12 This generally accepted notion is not entirely uncontested: cf. Jones, C.W. 1978, pp. 326-339. 13 Television interview with Bram van der Vlugt playing St. Nicholas – December 2004.

REFERENCES Blakeley, A. (1986) The Image of Blacks in Dutch Popular Culture to 1900. Leiden: Mimeo. Ghesquiere, R. (1989) Van Nicolaas van Myra tot Sinterklaas: de kracht van een verhaal. Leuven & Amersfoort: Acco. Helder, L. & Gravenberch, S. (ed), (1988) Sinterklaasje, kom maar binnen zonder knecht. Berchem: EPO.

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Jager, J.L. de (2001) Rituelen. Nieuwe en oude gebruiken in Nederland. Utrecht: Het Spectrum. Janssen, L. (1993) Nicolaas, de duivel en de doden. Baarn: Ambo. Jones, C.W. (1978) Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan: biography of a legend. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Leer, M. van (1995) Geven rond Sinterklaas: een ritueel als spiegel van veranderende relaties. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1993) ‘Father Christmas Executed’ in: Miller, D. (ed.) Unwrapping Christmas. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Matsier, N. (2000) ‘Onze multiculturele heilige’ in: Vitalis, O. De botten van SintNicolaas, Weeda, C. transl., Amsterdam: Atheneum, Polak&Van Gennep. Meisen, K. (1931/1981) Nikolauskult und Nikolausbrauch im Abendlande: eine kultgeographisch-volkskundliche Untersuchung. Düsseldorf: Schwann. Nederveen Pieterse, J.P. (1990) Wit over zwart, beelden van Afrika en zwarten in de westerse populaire cultuur, Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen.

SEARCHING FOR TENNESSEE: PERFORMATIVE IDENTITY AND THE THEATRICAL EVENT. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS/NEW ORLEANS LITERARY FESTIVAL CAROLYN BAIN [Finally, Stanley stumbles half-dressed out to the porch and down the wooden steps to the pavement before the building. There he throws back his head like a baying hound and bellows his wife’s name: Stella! Stella! Sweetheart! Stella!] (Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire) There will always be festivals to remember. (Tennessee Williams, The Two Character Play)

EVENTIFYING A THEATRICAL MOMENT In 1996 the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival invented the ‘Stella-and-Stanley Shout-off Contest’, exploiting Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire and creating another kind of success: an annual theatrical event, performed on the festival’s final day of five days of panels, interviews, classes, parties and book signings. The contest allows twenty-five contestants to perform their interpretations of the infamous lines, ‘Stella! Stella, Sweetheart! Stella!’ from scene three of Streetcar, during which Williams’s character, Stanley Kowalski, calls for his wife Stella, who escaped his violent outburst by retreating to a neighbour’s apartment in the French Quarter of New Orleans. In standing beneath the balcony and calling for Stella, Stanley creates a theatrical moment now so deeply rooted in the American psyche that performance of just the word, ‘Stella’, constructs a theatrical event; the event begins and ends with the utterance, ‘Stella’, performed out of context of the play yet within the framework of a literary festival that celebrates the name of the playwright and the play’s site. The shout-off serves as a theatrical event within the theatrical systems of a festival and communicates on multiple levels of experience, perception and memory. Theorised by Willmar Sauter, theatrical events act as cultural frameworks facilitating mutual interactions between the performer and

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the spectator. He proposes that during a festival communication occurs between performer and spectator at the levels of the sensory, artistic and symbolic (Sauter 2000: 31). Adding to Sauter’s work, Temple Hauptfleisch describes a festival as a theatrical event and a phenomenon of multiple theatrical systems related to the religious, artistic and cultural life of a particular community. Informed by the work of Sauter and Hauptfleisch, I argue that the shout-off simultaneously informs the artistic life of the community, performs the celebrity of Tennessee Williams, and communicates a capacity for sensuality that crosses traditions of both theatre and gender. Within the context of the festival and consideration of it as a theatrical event, the shout-off enhances our understanding of the artistic relationship of New Orleans and Tennessee Williams (19381984); the symbolic relationship of Tennessee Williams (1911-1984) and Marlon Brando (1924-2004) to celebrity identity; and the expression of sensuality in performance. For almost a decade the shout-off has attracted media attention, expanding the reputation of the festival while satisfying the criteria of eventification. Eventification argues for the unique model of performance, which enhances the separation between the ‘ordinary and extraordinary’ experience. The theatrical event is subject to a start and a stop time, exists in a defined space, and demonstrates communication experienced between audience and performer (Hauptfleisch 2004: 282). Behind the contestants’ shouts for Stella in the shout-off lie decades of memories of Stanley’s ‘Stellaaaaaa’ as it reverberated around the world, exploding expectations of the gender prototype male of the 1940s embedded in the romanticised images of actors Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne and Gary Cooper and their performances of the strong silent type. On 3 December 1947 at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre with actor Marlon Brando in the role of Stanley Kowalski in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, the opening night audience initially sat in dead silence at the play’s conclusion. From their stillness, the audience erupted into a thirty-minute ovation – a response that I propose confirmed the recognition of a moment in theatrical history. With Streetcar, Williams destabilised not only the social performance of gender but also his own identity as a writer. A Streetcar Named Desire, the play and the 1951 film of the play, followed Williams’s earlier success, The Glass Menagerie, adding to

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the trajectory of his celebrity. Williams’s work changed the landscape of literary identity and the borders of theatrical performance. Williams’s experimental treatment of sensuality on stage made an indelible impression on American audiences. With the addition of the shout-off, the festival forever changed its identity as a literary festival. The shout-off borrows the infamous moment from scene three of A Streetcar Named Desire when Stella abandons her sister Blanche for the mesmerising gaze of her husband, Stanley. As staged by Elia Kazan and played by Kim Hunter, Stella starts slowly down the stairs, as if summoned by a hypnotist. With measured steps, she descends the wrought-iron staircase and Stanley waits for her, dropping to his knees in subjugation. At the bottom of the stairs, Stella encounters Stanley simultaneously as lover, child and hero. Stanley and Stella’s communication contradicts the genderbased notion of masculine control. Stanley performs control over Stella by abandoning his control over himself. His performance of ‘Stella, Stella, Stella’ broke the frame of gendered conventions and constructed a celebrity identity for Williams so powerful that audiences and critics could not envision alternatives for Williams’s style as a writer. Streetcar was experimental theatre derived from Williams’s sense of freedom associated with his time in New Orleans. New Orleans’s culture helped Williams sever ties to traditional theatre and to frame his works in his personal perceptions. Williams’s New Orleans identity led to his experimentation and the origination of adult entertainment for the stage. NEW ORLEANS AND FRAMING DIFFERENCE I am delighted, in fact enchanted with this glamorous, fabulous old town. I’ve been here about 3 hours but have already wandered about the Vieux Carré and noted many exciting possibilities. Here surely is the place I was made for if any place on this funny old world. (Tennessee Williams, Journal Entry)

On 28 December 1938 Tennessee Williams, little-known American playwright, arrived in New Orleans, Louisiana, after visiting his maternal grandparents in Memphis, Tennessee (Leverich 1995: 272). Williams spent his first night in the city in a small uptown hotel of American Creole-style architecture (Holditch 2002: 61). Situated at Lee Circle and St Charles Avenue, the streetcar rattled on the island

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separating his seedy hotel from the exotic architectural façade of the Shriners’ Masonic Temple (National Park Service 2005a). Williams’s first glimpse of New Orleans illustrated the contradictions inherent in his own sensibilities on which he based his writings throughout his life. In New Orleans he observed examples of the very poor living side by side with the very rich; the affected gentry mingling with the authentic working class; and gays and straights living open lifestyles. His trip to New Orleans was intentional, and he anticipated that journey with great hope. Writing in his journal the night before his departure, he said, ‘Maybe a new scene will revive me’ (Leverich 1995: XXII). Before boarding a bus from Memphis to New Orleans, Williams made several changes to his early identity, the significance of which he would come to experience only years later. First, Williams mailed his entry to the New York-based Group Theatre play competition using the adopted name Tennessee Williams in place of his given name Thomas Lanier Williams; second, he listed his grandparents’ Memphis mailing address as his residence; and third, he submitted the year 1914 not 1911 as his birth year, thereby qualifying for the contest’s age limit of twenty-five (Leverich 1995: 274). With a new identity in a fresh locale, Williams found himself in a complex community of influences that were to have as significant an effect on his identity as his alterations to his name, address and age. New Orleans’s effect on Williams’s identity did not end with his death; in fact, it continues today through the annual Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, a theatrical event attracting thousands to a five-day celebration of the writing life (TWNOLF 2005a). In 1986, almost fifty years after Williams first toured New Orleans, the identity of the city and the writer remained intertwined, surfacing in casual discourse among friends intent on reviving New Orleans, a city in both an economic and cultural slump (City in Transition 1987). In October that year, over lunch at the local restaurant Mandina’s, a small group of civic-minded New Orleanians struggled to reconcile the city’s financial and cultural bankruptcy (Time-Picayune 1983). With financial resources depleted by heavy construction investments for the 1984 Louisiana World’s Exposition, which suffered from poor attendance and poor notices, New Orleans sank deeper into disrepair, relying on traditions of sport and spectacle,

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such as professional football, Mardi Gras and the Jazz Fest. Yes, there were conferences, but conferences did not generate interest in the city. Few activities in New Orleans cultivated a relationship between the city’s elite past of arts and literature and contemporary tourism. During that October afternoon’s discussion, a plan emerged to ignite cultural tourism by exploiting the phenomenon of the WilliamsNew Orleans relationship. One of the originators and long-standing festival board president Peggy Scott Laborde stated: I think there’s a two-part mission here, if you will. First of all, that term ‘cultural tourism’. In a lot of older cities in America you don't have factories, per se, and so you need to do something to bring visitors in for those dollars, which are very important to the city. And New Orleans is really an old city. It's a very gracious city and a grand city, but it's an old city and a relatively poor city. (Laborde 1999)

As far as Laborde and the others at Mandina’s were concerned, New Orleans had to find a way to celebrate the city’s ‘high’ culture in order to attract locals and tourists who would appreciate the city in the way that they did. Laborde said: I don't think you want it to be just a visitors' festival. You want a nice mix here, too. So, pretty much [it] is cultural ‘tourism’ as well as letting folks who live here in New Orleans and who love the city so much know that there is something else to be proud of, this incredible literary heritage. (Laborde 1999)

In the few months between October and April, Peggy Scott Laborde and Erroll Laborde, William M. Detweiler, J.D., Jeanne Detweiler and other artists, journalists and theatre people worked together to initiate the new event (Louisiana Historical Society 2002). On 3 April 1987 the first Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival welcomed over 500 attendees to a three-day schedule of events that began with a plaque dedication at 632 St Peter Street, the house where Williams completed his Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire. The events of that early April weekend included a party with foods mentioned in Williams’s plays, an award presentation for creative excellence in writing, a lecture by Lyle Leverich, Williams’s biographer, and a performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, staged at Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carré (TWNOLF 2005a). By 2005 the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival filled five days of events and sold over 10 000 tickets to those events. Over the course of its twenty years, festival organisers cultivated a

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theatrical event intended to kindle the creative spark of the writing life, exemplified by Williams’s early experiences in New Orleans (TWNOLF 2005a). Williams described the effects of his own digression into the French Quarter: I found the kind of freedom I had always needed. And the shock of it against the Puritanism of my nature has given me a theme, which I have never ceased exploiting. (Rice 1985)

The historic French Quarter defines the playing space of the festival and segues the present with the past, linking festival-goers with writers both contemporary and historical. William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, Lillian Hellman, Ellen Gilchrist, Christine Wiltz, Dorothy Allison, Julie Smith and Anne Rice are but a few for whom New Orleans has prompted creative productivity. Author Andrei Codrescu wrote, ‘There is something about New Orleans that makes writers happy’ (Long 1999: coverpage). Like Williams and such notable twentieth-century writers, festival-goers wander the French Quarter’s irregular sidewalks speckled with tourists and navigate narrow corridors riddled with mildew from centuries of neglect. Walking tours led by literary guides such as Dr Kenneth Holditch, one of the Festival organisers, invite groups to meander through Williams’s French Quarter, observing his favourite haunts and multiple residences, which emerge in sharp contrast to the places of his early life in Mississippi and St Louis.1 In fact, before 1938 acts of restraint and concealment dominated Williams’s behaviour (Leverich 1995: 275), contrasting dramatically with the laissez-faire attitude and Caribbean atmosphere of New Orleans (Brady 1999: XI). Williams longed for change and, on the eve of 1939 he exchanged his life of moderation and self-control for the freedom and individuality offered in New Orleans. The liminal landscape of the French Quarter invited escape from his volatile family relations,2 including years of psychological abuse by his father Cornelius; incessant criticism by his over-protective mother Edwina; signs of his sister Rose’s mental deterioration; and clashes with his younger brother Dakin (Leverich 1995: 275). Williams wanted to change not only the roof over his head, but also everything else about his life – except for his writing. He needed

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to write; he needed to write poetry, but he soon found out there was no money in poetry, and Williams wanted to make his own living (Bray 1995: 777-778). Although he considered moving to New York to escape his contentious family life in St Louis, the money-conscious writer chose New Orleans, believing that the southern city would involve less risk and less expense (Leverich 1995: 273).Perceived to offer the potential for both inexpensive living and artistic community, New Orleans became Williams’s targeted destination. Biographer Lyle Leverich reported Williams’s journal entry for 28 December 1938, in which he wrote: Sufficient to say now that I am sleepy and happy or as nearly happy as old T.L.W. is able to be! The bed looks clean – I hope it is! –Tomorrow I will go out first thing to locate a cheap furnished room in the artists’ section to ‘a place in love with life.’ (National Park Service 2005b)

After only one night in his uptown room at 1124 St Charles Avenue, Williams sought accommodation in the historic Vieux Carré, the artists’ community of New Orleans, which was transformed from slums by the influx of intelligentsia displaced by the Great Depression who were seeking asylum in New Orleans, home of the Louisiana Writers Project.3 In the Vieux Carré Williams found an experience markedly different from his life before his coming to New Orleans.4 Only a few days after his arrival, Williams celebrated New Year’s Eve 1938 in the French Quarter, an event that transformed his perceptions about himself and the artistic way of life. Williams notes in his personal journal: New Year’s Day – 1939 – What a nite! I was introduced to the artistic and Bohemian life of the Quarter with a bang! All very interesting, some utterly appalling. (Leverich 1995: 277)

In one night of New Orleans-style festivities Williams recognised another dimension to his persona that illuminated the core of his writing. Describing Williams’s motivations in his obituary, Time magazine’s writer T.E. Kalem remembered Williams’s saying, ‘I was brought up puritanically. I try to outrage that puritanism’ (Kalem 1983: 88). In a 1982 interview with Eric Paulsen, Williams said, ‘In New Orleans, I discovered a certain flexibility in my nature – it happened on New Year’s Eve’ (Leverich 1995).

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Williams’s performed his ‘flexibility’, on and off the page, expressing his sensitivity to the marginalised communities, the outcasts and the outraged. In the 1940s and 1950s Williams’s work shook the foundations of popular culture and his celebrity status soared, but in the 1960s and 1970s he succumbed to the debilitating effects of personal loss and media criticism. In 1983 Williams died unexpectedly from suffocation (Kalem 1983: 88). In 2005 the complicated identity of Williams is alive in text, in effigy and in celebration, enticing both general and intellectual audiences through the eventification of the phenomenon of Williams and New Orleans (Turner, Bonner & Marshall 2000: 12). The effect is, of course, to turn celebrities into commodities, products to be marketed in their own right or to be used to market other commodities. Marketing of the celebrity as commodity has been deployed as a major strategy in the commercial construction of social identity. The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival’s system of events interrogates and constructs ongoing consideration of Williams’s biography. The festival informs our knowledge and understanding of Williams, but what does it offer to the study of identity and its extenuating frames, performance and celebrity? The festival’s programmed events range from the scholarly to the ribald, including master classes, panels, reminiscences, a marketplace of books and memorabilia, the opening night celebration, a scholar’s conference, interviews, walking tours and a shouting competition. The overall effect is a system of systems seamlessly crafted by performers both in front of and behind the scenes, all playing to audiences searching for Tennessee. The festival serves multiple agendas, creating revenue for the city with ‘heads in beds’, stimulating interest in Tennessee Williams, building communities of interest and influence, and complicating the identity of New Orleans. For example, a result of the festival the Historic New Orleans Collection maintains one of the largest accumulations of Williams’s work, the Fred Todd Collection. The Historic New Orleans Collection also preserves the archives of Williams’s agent, Bill Barnes, including letters both to and from Maria Britneva St Just, co-executor of Williams’s estate. The festival also co-sponsors two annual scholarly journals and promotes the limited edition Letter Press Elephant Folio featuring a recently discovered, never-before-published Tennessee

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Williams play and illustrations by celebrated artist Clarice Smith (TWNOLF 2005b). The festival showcases readings and productions of previously unknown Williams’s works and versions of well-known works. It recognises new scholarship and publications on Williams that deepen both the general and intellectual public’s knowledge of Williams and his multifaceted identity. MEDIATING MARLON: CELEBRITY FOR A DAY Five days of a festival designed to enchant the writer in everyone; five days of events that culminate in a spectacle of strangers shouting for a prize of little tangible value. For ten of its twenty years the Festival presented a series of events consistent with its homage to the struggle of the writing life and to the courage of Tennessee Williams and other writers and writer-heroes. What happens to the identity of a literary festival when it adds a sporting event to its theatrical line-up? The simple answer is: the media attend. Television, radio and print media come year after year. Media representatives – from National Public Radio and local television stations to magazines and newspapers reaching national audiences, including Southern Living Magazine, Travel Magazine, Dallas Morning News, American Theatre Magazine, the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Variety and Comparative Drama, to name a few – cover the final day’s theatrical event that ruptures all notions of a literary festival. The shout-off is advertised as a festival, but it differs from the festival in many ways. The shout-off is free and open to the public. No tickets are required for the audience, but registration is essential for the contestants. The start time is promoted as 4:30 pm, but as early as 4:00 pm people start to gather and mingle, prompting minor outbursts of ‘Stella’ rehearsals followed by peals of laughter and calls for ‘more beer’. From 4:00 pm to about 5:15 pm the festival dominates the heart of the French Quarter. Although no formal signage is allowed in the area, the festival hangs a flexible banner with its logo and title boldly painted along a span of thirty feet of oilcloth tacked to the balcony of Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carré. Across the street from the Little Theatre, at the nineteenth-century Pontalba Apartments, festival board members hang a large white, scarf-like banner over the balcony railing. The scarf reads ‘Stella’ painted in two-foot-high black letters

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Contestants sign-up and take a number to compete in the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival's closing day event the Stella Shout-off Contest. Photo by the author.

and is visible to passers-by across Jackson Square. Before the contest begins, transgressions abound as contestants rehearse their shouts: women perform men, men perform women, some use cell phones, children shout without understanding but with enjoyment, each shouting his or her impassioned pleas for Stanley, Stella, or both. Interestingly, of the four Contests that I have attended, a woman has never made it to the finals. With even a quick glance, it is easy to discern that the contestants transgress stereotypical casting. On occasion, I have seen not only male and female contestants, but also ones whose gender appeared irrelevant. Persons costumed as birds and cows have joined the competition shouting for Stella, dropping any linguistic association with their costumes. As a participant-observer of the 2004 Stella-and-Stanley shoutoff, and attending the contest for the fourth time, I volunteered at the registration table to observe the behind-the-scenes activities where, as Goffman suggests, the ‘back’ of an event reveals more of the event’s performance. I placed my video camcorder on a tripod and let it freely record my exchanges with participants. Free of the equipment, I could

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interact with the participants and study performer and spectator behaviours. As contestants approached the registration table, I asked them to recall the ways they had prepared for the shouting competition. With little hesitation, each contestant offered his or her answer such as ‘I’ve been practising in the shower’, or ‘I rented the movie’. One contestant’s partner replied, ‘Mostly, he’s been screaming at me’. Almost without exception, laughter followed each person’s answer. The registrants responded to my questions both verbally and physically. One participant punctuated his reply by ‘pumping up his arms’ to emphasise his musculature; another registrant swigged his beer then thumped his chest and belched. In one instance a father turned to his nineteen-year-old son, put his arm around him, patted him on the back, and told me that his son would be competing with him this year. The father confessed to their practising together for the contest. They arrived together and signed release forms to secure a number and a place in the select group of the shouting twenty-five. The father and son Stanleys constructed their own rites of passage. THEATRICAL EVENT TO RITUAL In this modern culture, where few rites of passage remain, that year’s shout-off evidenced the power of ritual to transform relationships through performance. The shout-off contest and its multilayered communications transcend even the artistic, sensory and symbolic to offer transformation associated with the religious practices of the community. New Orleans is a town notorious for its celebrations – from funerals and Christenings to first communions and saints’ days; festivals both sacred and profane fill the city’s calendar of events. The literary festival takes on a function of a rite of passage as it approaches its closing events. Offering a possibility for transformation, the shout-off constructs a community of performers and spectators who coalesce in the name of Streetcar and summon memories of the dead to lift the living across a threshold of celebrity. From the balcony of the Pontalba apartments (circa 1850), judges, VIPs and the Stella-and-Stanley facilitators have a clear view of the contestants. Promptly at 4:30 pm the host introduces the balcony audience and the contest procedures: contestants are to perform in sequence by the number that they drew when registering for the event. Each contestant may yell ‘Stella’ or ‘Stanley’ three

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times, but there is a noticeable omission: no one announces the criteria for winning. The host simply says that the judges will be influenced by the audience’s response to the contestants’ performances. The host’s reminder summons the ghosted though palpably present performance of Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. Quite different from the advertised programme of guest speakers in controlled settings, the contest suspends scholarship and explodes with the unpredictable performances of its participants. The situation orchestrated in the shout-off proposes a freedom from social norms and a break from familiar identities. One woman said of her participating husband, ‘I don’t know him!’ Her rejection, however, only seemed to amuse the participant and prompted him to laugh and let out a small shout of ‘Stella’. In 2004 registrants were slow to line up for their numbers, and I observed the festival’s president and contest originator Peggy Laborde take matters into her own hands. Because the French Quarter forbids electronic amplification, Laborde resorted to her own vocal resources. By 4:10 she yelled, ‘Step up to the registration desk.’ ‘Sign-up here for the Stella-and-Stanley Shout-off Contest.’ Her call produced results. By 4:15 the registration line consisted of at least ten ‘wannabe’ Stanleys and Stellas waiting to sign talent releases and receive their contestant numbers. Festival volunteers seated behind the registration table worked carefully to match names and numbers. The seriousness with which they registered the twenty-five contributed to the transformational experience. I could see that with the exchange of signature for numbered placard, the contestant changed his or her engagement with the spectators, who had formed an ellipse that enclosed a performance space. Waving a numbered card with letters large enough to read from fifty feet away, the contestants wandered among the participants, announcing their numbers to friends, practising their ‘Stella’ bleats, and blurring the lines of performance with the participatory nature of spectatorship. Before the contest’s start, the crowd had grown to several hundred. From the balcony the actors loosely improvising Stella and Stanley yell to the crowd below that the contest is about to begin. The Stanley character introduces the judges, who include local theatre celebrities, national critics and Dakin Williams, Tennessee’s younger

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Stanley Shouts to Balcony of Judges in the Stella Shout-off contest on the last day of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. Photograph courtesy of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival

brother, who joins the balcony judges each year. In previous years celebrity judges have included actors who had worked on Williams’s plays or had known Williams personally, such as Elizabeth Ashley, Alex Baldwin, Patricia Neal, Dick Cavett, Carrie Nye, Eli Wallach and Ann Jackson, and Kim Hunter (1922-2002), the original Stella on stage and in film. With so many celebrities and celebrity aspirants, the media’s attention on the Stella-and-Stanley shout-off is no surprise. Cameras flash. Tape rolls. The members of the media return year after year to record the contest. Contestants accept the camera’s role in the event and they ignore the cameras’ peeping gazes. Contestants focus their attention on the Stella or Stanley effigies physically perched on the unreachable heights of the second story balcony. The crowd of observers harbour the contestants within their midst until the moment of summons and a number is called. Then, magically the next contestant appears in the centre of the circle, takes a moment to orient his or her gaze on the balcony and gathers breath to support the

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anticipated peal. What Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner describe in terms of ritual, the contest imitates as the stages of a rite of passage. The eager participants bare their chests, fall to their knees, and ravage their voices with unique interpretations of the ‘Stella’ shout. What is going on in the performances of the shout-off contestants? I argue that ritual supports the event, so that few rules are needed to communicate the intended experience of performers and spectators. When I asked a finalist in the 2004 competition about his motivation, he said, ‘I think of everything I want in life, and I call it Stella’. The contest takes place as both an outdoor and indoor theatrical event with a defined start and completion time. From beginning to end less than two hours transpires during which twenty-five people express their passionate longings by shouting ‘Stella’ in view of hundreds of onlookers. The contest suggests a ritual or rite of passage, marking a life transition; just what kind of transition prompts scholarly and commercial explanations. For example, the movement patterns of participants and observers mimic what Belgian anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep proposed in his work on rites of passage, noting three stages: (1) separation or removal of the individual from his or her existing status, (2) suspension between two states, and (3) reintegration into the group (Gennep 1960: 21). CONSTRUCTING DIFFERENCE You healthy Polack, without a nerve in your body, of course you don’t know what anxiety feels like! Stanley: I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is a one-hundred-per-cent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack. (Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire)

Alternatively, the contest can be studied as spectacle evidenced in the work of Guy Debord who wrote, ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images’ (DeBord 1995: 12). The contest can also be viewed through the lens of G.F.W. Hegel, who wrote, ‘A mirror mediates the thing it is reflecting and its image.’For our Stanleys-in-performance there is a

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Brando image reflecting on the performer’s image. The meaning of Stanley identifies a social force as much as desire. José Estaband Munoz suggested in his writings on Latino/Latina performance and identity that minorities’ performances can be seen as acts of survival and assertion of activism (Munoz 1999: 25). The festival wears the contest as a badge of difference. Although constructed by its organisers as a publicity stunt, the contest but has resulted in a tectonic shift in the festival’s identity. Not only the celebrity of Brando’s performance but also the identity of Williams’s character, Stanley, echoes the provocative theories of Munoz when he borrowed Hegel’s concept of identity in difference. Director Elia Kazan said, ‘Stanley didn’t give a damn how he said a thing. His purpose was to convey his idea. He had no awareness of himself at all’ (Jones 1986: 145). Marlon Brando, plumber and general handyman, asserted his difference from the character Stanley and protested that he detested the guy. Brando’s indelible performance of Stanley forever complicated the performance of sexuality. Before this role, American film and stage performances usually had certain restraints, certain predictabilities: women were women and men were not (women). Although actors would portray powerful emotions, a degree of self-control was prevalent – until Brando’s performance of Stanley. Brando provided his own theory of the experience of constructing identity in performance, claiming that the phenomenon of any great performance was in the situation itself. He referred to another role for which he received an Academy Award. Brando said: Yeah. People say very moving. And people often spoke about the, ‘oh, my God, what a wonderful scene, Marlon, blah blah blah blah blah blah.’ It wasn’t wonderful at all. The situation was wonderful. Everybody feels like he could have been a contender, he could have been somebody, everybody feels as though he’s better, he could have been better. Everybody feels a sense of loss about something. So that was what touched people. It wasn’t the scene itself. There are other scenes where you’ll find actors being expert, but since the audience can’t clearly identify with them, they just pass unnoticed. Wonderful scenes never get mentioned, only those scenes that affect people. (Grobel 1979: 97)

The effect of Brando’s performance on future interpretations of Williams’s situation in A Streetcar Named Desire cannot be diminished. In fact, many contestants in the Stella-and-Stanley shout-

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off demonstrably perform a memory of Brando’s performance. Most have neither read nor seen the play version of the script. Kazan, director of the first production of Streetcar, described Stanley’s social behaviour: ‘[Stanley] is the basic animal cynicism of today. “Get what’s coming to you! Don’t waste a day! Eat, drink, get yours!”’ Kazan said that ‘God and nature gave [Stanley] a fine sensory apparatus—he enjoys!’ (Jones 1986: 145). Both vulnerable and bullish, Stanley as a World War II veteran symbolises the emotional devastation and cultural ravages of war. Stanley survived the war and returned a fighter, living on his instincts and masking his limited facility for language through outbursts of passion. Williams’s characterisation of Stanley exceeds all expectations for an actor’s playing in the 1950s. Williams’s vision of the underrepresented such as the poor and poorly educated reached beyond theatrical styles such as Modernism and the Avant-garde. Writing on Williams, Philip Kolin argued that Williams constructs an identity for the play [Streetcar] outside the sphere of traditional realistic theatre. ‘People have said that Williams absolutely invented the idea of desire for the 20th century’, Kolin said. ‘It was a play that dealt with for the very first time on the American stage, female sexuality and male sexuality’ (Kolin 1998: 51). Critic Lloyd Rose stated that Stanley was ‘a nightmare feminist critique of maleness: brutish and infantile’ (Rose 1994). Recalling Munoz’s interpretation of identity in difference, I argue that Stanley participates in a ‘disidentificatory performance’ of traditional masculinity. The duality of his performance, at once male and female, renounces that which ‘majoritarian culture has decreed as the real’ (Munoz 1999: 194). IDENTIFYING WITH THE PAST; PERFORMING THE PRESENT Displaced transmission constitutes the adaptation of historic practices to changing conditions, in which popular behaviours are resituated in new locales. (Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead)

Time and place play an important role in any theatrical event, whether playful or ritualistic. Sociologist Erving Goffman emphasised the importance of time, because it involved suspense, ‘namely, a concerned awaiting of the outcome’ (Goffman 1974: 46). The shout-

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off occurs in the same place and at the same time on a Sunday in New Orleans on the final day of the festival. About 4:00 pm on the day of the shout-off, street vendors, mostly psychic readers and painters, posted along the Pontalba Apartments start packing up to leave. Anticipating the onslaught of the contest crowd, the vendors relinquish their claim to the tourist trade. One painter remarked that at first he was ‘mad’, but had since come to terms with the break in his ‘schedule’. Only a few signs indicate the coming attraction: a banner is dropped from the balcony, a registration table is set up, and a person costumed as a Southern Comfort whiskey bottle mills around the crowd. The bottle or event’s mascot draws attention from passers-by, who then stop by the registration table to ask, ‘What in the world is going on here?’ and then they ask, ‘When does it start?’ EVENTIFYING THE PHENOMENON The shout-off competition eventifies the phenomenon of the utterance ‘Stella’, identified with Williams, Brando and the festival itself. In fact, additional research on the explosion of contestant-based performances on television informs the success of the shout-off event. The contest makes an event of the festival and offers another pathway to attaining celebrity status: if not through writing, then through shouting. The shout-off appeals to the media and the unpredictability that the media crave. In its competitiveness the shout-off communicates a culture of aggression. Someone wins. Many lose. Spectators cheer, applaud, and through their responses participate in the contest’s choice of winners. Spontaneous and direct, the contest’s playful communication mediates the inherent hostility among tourists and residents, scholars and vendors. The contest contrasts with the seriousness of the writing life as studied throughout the festival’s system of panels and master classes (Goffman 1974: 48-49). The contest expresses difference and constructs identity. Simply put, Stanley screams for Stella and in the power of this utterance restores a memory of groundbreaking stage and screen performances, the phenomenon of which never ceases to inspire exploitation. Brando’s performance of Stanley, expressing his desire for Stella, defied traditions of the strong silent type. Brando’s ‘Stella’ rattles the foundation of what is ‘normal’ between a man and a woman. Through his failure to restrain his emotions, Stanley

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‘disidentifies’ with the ‘pasty normative’ traditions of middle-class southern culture’.5 Stanley’s passionate plea for his wife echoes the ‘over-the-top’ hyper-expressiveness associated with discourse on Latino/Latina conduct, certainly not what audiences knew of behaviours of Poles (Munoz 1999: XII). The memory preserved by the re-enactment of the mediated performance of actor Marlon Brando, playing Stanley Kowalski to actress Kim Hunter’s Stella, resonates below the surface of quotidian life. Not limited by gender, but restricted by text, the performance of one word said three times maintains the power to perforate the tension between opposing forces. The infamous exchange created by Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire conjures an identity not only for the participants, but also for the festival. Borrowing an idea from the Theatre and Performance Studies scholar Joseph Roach, Stella and Stanley are ‘betwixt and between’, poised between several dialectics, including lovers and children, performance and ritual, back and front, ritual and media, scholarship and spectacle (Roach 1996: 33). I want to suggest that the shout-off eventifies a moment of theatrical history and destabilises the identity of the festival as a literary conference. The festival’s ten-year reverberation of ‘Stellllaaaah.’ ‘Stellllaaah.’ ‘Stellllah’ affirms the power of the theatrical event to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary; to satisfy the tourists’ basic needs for identity exchange; to exchange the inauthentic for the authentic; and the self for the Other (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 73). I use authenticity to refer to that location or person which has sustained an identity in spite of cultural and economic change. Whether engrossed in the act of competing or the act of witnessing, the festival participants traverse a liminal terrain where the past informs the present and releases the present to the experience of change. Like Williams’s early experiences in New Orleans, the ‘shouters’ free themselves from previous lives and give over to an impulse of the present. For some, it is a momentary escape or lifealtering exchange; for others it is a theatrical event, which the participants understand has the power of transforming their quotidian lives into the extraordinary experience of celebrity.

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NOTES 1

Identity is found in difference. See Hegel 1952: 190. Anthropologist Victor Turner describes liminal in terms of liberation. A place of liminality is that of a spatial, social, spiritual threshold (Turner 1982). 3 The Louisiana Writers Project employed out-of-work journalists and other whitecollar workers. Lyle Saxon served as the project's director. The project was active in Louisiana from 1935 until 1943. See Library of Congress, ‘Exhibitions: Authors and the Federal Writers Project’, LOC Online 5 July 2005. (20 August 2005). 4 Williams’s second address in New Orleans was 431 Royal Street in a house a few doors down from the Historic New Orleans Collection and site of multiple events of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. See Leverich 1995: 276. 5 Pasty normative is used in this context to refer to heterosexual Anglo-Saxons. See Munoz,1999: XII. 2

REFERENCES Brady, P. (1999) Foreword in Literary New Orleans, Long J. (1999). City in Transition. New Orleans 1983-1986 (1987) Prod. and dir. Glorianna Davenport and Richard Leacock, 180 min., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Lab, videocassette. DeBord, G. (1995) The Society of Spectacle, trans. Donald Nigholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books. Gagnard, F. (1987) ‘A New Festival is Making Its Debut’, Times-Picayune, Lagniappe section, New Orleans, April 3. Goffman, E. (1974) Frame Analysis, Boston: Northwestern University Press. Grobel, L. (1979) ‘Marlon Brando Interview’, Playboy, 26, No. 1, January. Hauptfleisch, T (2004) ‘Eventification: Utilizing the Theatrical System to Frame the Event’, in Theatrical Events Borders, Dynamics, Frames, Cremona, V. A., Eversmann, P., Maanen, H. van, Sauter, W. & Tulloch, J. (eds), Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Hegel, G. W. F. (1952) Philosophy of History, trans. Knox, T.M., Chicago: William Benton. Holditch, K. (2002) Tennessee Williams and the South, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Jones, D. R. (1986) ‘Elia Kazan and A Streetcar Named Desire’ in Great Directors at Work, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kalem, T.E. (1983) ‘The Laureate of the Outcast’, Time 121, No. 1, March. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1998) Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage Berkeley: University of California. Kolin, P. (1998) Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Laborde, P. (1999) Festival president and founder, interview by author, March 24, New Orleans, tape recording, Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans.

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Leverich, L. (1995) Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. Long, J. (ed), (1999) Literary New Orleans, Athens, GA: Hill Street Press. Louisiana Historical Society (2002) ‘Minutes of the Louisiana Historical Society September 12, 2000’, LHS Online, http://www.louisianahistoricalsociety.org/minutes.htm, November 4. Munoz, J. E. (1999) Disidentifications, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. National Park Service (2005a), ‘New Orleans Jazz History Walking Tours’, NPS Online, http://www.nps.gov/jazz/walking%20Tours/tour%206.pdf, August 10. National Park Service (2005b) ‘Teaching with Historic Places Lesson Plans’, NPS Online http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/20vieux/20setting.htm, October 10. Rice, R. (1985) ‘A Man Named Tennessee’, New York Post, M2, April 30; quoted in Lyle Leverich (1995: 285). Roach, J. (1996) Cities of the Dead, New York: Columbia University Press. Robert Bray, R. (1995) ‘An Interview with Dakin Williams’ in The Mississippi Quarterly, 48. Rose, L. (1994) ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Washington Post Online, January 21, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/style/longterm/movies/videos/astreetc arnameddesirenrrose_a09e20.htm, October 4 1999. Sauter, W (2000) The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Time-Picayune (1983) sec. 1, New Orleans, February 27. Turner V. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing Arts Journal. Turner, G., Bonner, F. & Marshall, P. D. (2000) Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. TWNOLF (2005a) Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, TWNOLF Homepage http://www.tennesseewilliams.net/about.html September 17. TWNOLF (2005b) Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, TWNOLF Homepage, http://www.tennesseewilliams.net, August 23. Van Gennep, A. (1960) The Rites of Passage, trans. Vizedom M. B. & Caffee, G.L., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

ABSTRACTS In order of appearance

Willmar Sauter, Festivals as theatrical events: building theories. In this introductory chapter the history of the Working Group’s attempts to solve some of the theoretical problems of the concept of the Theatrical Event is summarized. My own proposal from the group’s previous book Theatrical Events – Borders, Dynamics, Frames is presented once more and its components – Playing Culture, Cultural Context, Contextual Theatricality and Theatrical Playing – are applied to festivals. The chapter shows that these components very well fit into the overall structure of festival cultures. Henri Schoenmakers, Festivals, theatrical events and communicative interactions. This article starts with the question in which respect the communicative interaction of a performance within the framework of a festival is different from the same performance presented outside a festival context. After basic considerations about a festival as an ‘event of events’ and about the extension of the role of the spectator with the role of ‘festival participant’, hypotheses about possible differences with regard to the interpretation, emotions and evaluation between a performance within and outside a festival structure are discussed. Temple Hauptfleisch, Festivals as eventifying systems. This chapter explores ways in which festivals may function as eventifying mechanisms within the broader society, based on what one might call the latent ‘eventness’ of festival itself as an entity – for the festival as a cultural event in its own way eventifies elements and issues of the particular society in which it is taking place. Taking the notion of the festival as a poly-system as starting-point, Hauptfleisch explores the mechanisms and processes by which the festival as event (and therefore its management structures) are utilized to festivalise and thus ultimately to eventify (i.e. make socially significant) the artistic output of the actor, director, choreographer, etc. Linda Streit, The theatricality of the Verona Opera Festival. The Roman Arena of Verona provides a lavish natural setting where city and stage space merge to create a living spectacle. The unique, multi-generic character of the Verona Opera Festival is considered according to a phenomenological perspective to fully comprehend its global popularity. The festival thrives because the whole metonymically represents the sum of many parts, which together create a successful (read: profitable) production. ‘L’opera. Il mito’ utilises its inherent theatricality to effect a global event by the combination of various elements, such as the urban geography, the polyglot audience, and the on and off stage conspicuous consumption.

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Georgia Seffrin, The Out-of-the-Box Festival of Early Childhood: fashioning the boutique festival for children. In recent years the construct of the festival has shifted considerably, engaging with contemporary debates regarding issues of identity and community. One manifestation of this engagement is the boutique festival, which focuses on a particular audience, and which positions that audience to substantially produce its own festival experience, in a manner far more rigorous than more conventional festival models. The Out-of-the-Box Festival of Early Childhood, produced by the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Australia, is a potent example of a boutique festival, in which key elements pertaining to the manner in which this model of festival production, including audience positioning, notions of excellence, consultation, philosophy, programming, and the use of space, are explored. Temple Hauptfleisch, In search of the rainbow: the Little Karoo National Arts Festival and the search for cultural identity in South Africa. This chapter explores the specific way in which two ground-breaking festivals in South Africa – the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK) in Oudtshoorn – are used to as festivalising for cultural political purposes in the multi-cultural context of a country with 9 official languages and more than 140 annual festivals of various sizes and functions. More particularly the chapter takes a look at the role played by the KKNK as an eventifying instrument in the struggle for the recognition and maintenance of the Afrikaans language and culture. Jacqueline Martin & Willmar Sauter, Playing politics at the Adelaide Festival. The Adelaide Festival takes place every two years. In 2002, the artistic director of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts was Peter Sellars and the first part of the chapter traces the complicated politics of engaging a non-Australian to compose the programme of the festival. With a focus on Aboriginal performances – one of Sellars’ themes for the festival – the performances, the festival structure and the controversies within the Adelaide context are analyzed. The second part deals with the festival of 2004, when the Aboriginal choreographer Stephen Page was chosen as artistic director. Again, performances are presented, the contextual theatricality as well as the cultural context are analyzed and through the lens of playing culture, these two festival years are compared to each other. Henri Schoenmakers, Hybrid festivals. The Mickery Theatre: In search of a dramaturgy of fragmentation. The borderlines between festivals at one hand and performances at the other hand become fluid in the case of performances which are collages of single theatrical events for which other theatre makers are responsible than the organiser of the performance as a whole. In this article some performances and festivals are discussed, in order to find out in which cases festivals or single theatrical events show characteristics consisting of a mix of protypical features of both types of events.

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David J. Buch & Hana Worthen, Ideology in movement and a movement in ideology: the ‘Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934’. This article analyzes the Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 held in Berlin, focusing on the discrepancy between the values embodied in National Socialist discourse and the values represented on the stage. Through a reconstruction of the festival’s program and an examination of archival sources and reception, the article places the Tanzfestspiele in its historical context, particularly in regard to the enforced conformity to the canon of “New German Dance,” showing the Tanzfestspiele to negotiate between past and current dance paradigms and the emotive rhetoric of the Third Reich. Farah Yeganeh, Iranian theatre festivalised. This article explores contemporary Iranian theatre festivals and their relation to the whole structure of theatrical playing in the country. It examines in particular the role of the most important decision-making centre for theatre and theatre festivals. The Dramatic Arts Centre (DAC), the theatrical branch of the Ministry of Culture. The main framework of the article is based on a model developed by IFTR Working Group “Theatrical Event”. Two of the four elements have been selected to develop the concept of festivals as theatrical events. The section titled ‘Organisation and Cultural Context’ will discuss the organisational structure of festivals; and the section ‘Contextual theatricality’ will analyse the framework of the festival culture. Some fifty festivals and mini-festivals are held annually throughout the whole country. They are categorized in the article according to their genre: international, national, regional and community. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, The Israeli National Community Theatre Festival: the real and the imagined. This article focuses on The National Community Theatre in Israel in order to demonstrate what happens when co-communities (marginal communities) appropriate the concept and the rules of the game of festival to their own benefit. Community theatre in Israel is a means of self representation within co-communities that usually exist on the geographical, social, political and artistic margins of the public sphere. The National Community Theatre Festival is thus a subversive tactic by which the powerless groups present their move from the margins to the centre and transform themselves to visible social agents. This festival then celebrates the latent potential for social activism that these groups have when they are coming together and imagine themselves powerful, united and prestigious. Willmar Sauter, The values of a festival – the Swedish Theatre Biennale. The Swedish theatre festivals, taking place every two years, are peculiar festivals in the sense that they lack a public audience. More than a thousand theatre professionals gather for four days to present and watch the most exiting productions of the last two years in between lectures, debates, master classes and coffee breaks. There is hardly any room for local visitor to see a performance. Nevertheless, the hosting city sponsors the festival, newspapers report on it and the citizens look amazed at the crowd of known and unknown artists. What are the values of such a festival? Why is it held every two years and who benefits from it?

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These questions are pursued according to the model of the theatrical event as presented in the introduction. Politics, management, environment and experiences are juxtaposed as equally important elements of the festival as a theatrical event. An expanded model pointing out some of values at stake concludes the chapter. Wendy Clupper, Burning Man: festival culture in the United States – festival culture in a global perspective. This article analyzes an annual week-long desert gathering that has sparked a regional movement worldwide and has itself grown into a performance culture. Burning Man rejects philosophically commodification, encourages radical self-expression and subverts the usual social order by providing participants the opportunity to explore performatively change in social behavior away from economically competitive living. While considering Burning Man’s tenets of non-commercialism and radical selfexpression, this chapter considers how and why this now twenty-year old happening offers an important lens through which to consider performance and live interactive art in the United States today. Matthias Warstat, Community building within a festival frame – working-class celebrations in Germany 1918-33. The concept of festival can help to understand the framework within which political community building took place in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the methods employed in doing so. Political communities were established within different kinds of cultural performances such as gatherings, demonstrations, party conventions, and – most frequently – political celebrations, which obtained a festival-like structure. Referring to examples from the labour movement, this article examines different techniques of creating communities and discusses the impact of theatrical strategies and certain types of theatre in this crucial field of modern politics. Christina Nygren, Festivals in religious or spiritual contexts: examples from Japan, China, India and Bangladesh. This essay put focus on religious and spiritual festival traditions in Japan, China, India and Bangladesh where the performing arts not only play a part as aesthetic experience or as entertainment but serve as a unifying event for certain groups in the social structure, reflecting a sense of the relationship between the physical and the spiritual as a collective memory. The culture of festivals and the connecting performative events is seen in a contextual light where both similarities and differences are clearly visible and where even the invisible recipients and spiritual performers are taken seriously. Peter Eversmann, The Feast of Saint Nicholas in the Low Countries. Every year -around three weeks before his birthday on December 6th- Saint Nicholas visits the Netherlands. After a journey overseas from Spain the old bishop arrives by boat together with his black helpers (Zwarte Pieten) and his white mount. On Saint Nicholas’ eve (December 5th) everybody is getting presents – also the grown ups – often wrapped in a funny way and with a poem that makes fun of the recipient. The feast is analysed as a theatrical festival and the complexities of playing and watching Saint Nicholas are discussed. By the time they are seven or eight years

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old children come to realize that the saint and his helpers are actors playing out fictional roles. With that realization however they are also initiated into an adult secret and become players in the game. As such the feast of Saint Nicholas, that has existed since the Middle Ages, is not only a rite of passage but also a binding factor in the Dutch society. The present form of the tradition has its roots in the 19th century but in a continuous process of adaptation the changes in the social context are reflected and incorporated – ensuring the feast’s contribution to the cultural identity of the Low Countries to this day. Carolyn Bain, Searching for Tennessee: performative identity and the theatrical event. Tennessee Williams/New Orleans literary festival. Borrowing from scene three in Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival presents one program in the five-day festival that eventifies a moment theatre history so deeply rooted in the American psyche that the utterance of one word, “Stella,” constructs a festival phenomenon, the Stella Shout-off contest. Hundreds of the festival’s observers watch twenty-five participants publicly perform Stanley Kowalski’s call for his wife Stella. This article uses Willmar Sauter’s and Temple Hauptfleisch’s concepts to investigate the interrelationships of theatrical systems evidenced in consideration of the festival as a theatrical event

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BIOGRAPHIES Carolyn Bain is president of Bain Pugh & Associates, Inc., an award-winning creative and media services firm, specialising in organisational identity and performance. She is a Ph.D. candidate in theatre and performance studies at the University of Maryland, College Park where she has been a Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH) Fellow and a Clara and Robert Vambery Fellow in comparative literature. At the University of Alabama-Birmingham, she was a tenured, associate professor and head of theatre. David J. Buch, Professor of Music History at the University of Northern Iowa and currently Visiting Professor of Music at Wayne State University, has published in numerous scholarly journals and books. His most recent book is /Schikaneders heroisch-komische Oper //Der Stein der Weisen/ (2002, with Manuela Jahrmärker), His edition of the opera /Der Stein der Weisen/ will be published by A-R Editions in 2007. His next book is /Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests: Music and the Supernatural in the Eighteenth-Century Theater/. In 1998 he was named UNI Distinguished Scholar and received the Donald N. McKay Research Award. Wendy Clupper is a doctoral candidate in the United States at the University of Maryland at College Park in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies. Her dissertation is entitled, "The Performance Culture of Burning Man," and her theatre research focuses on new experimental performance spaces and genres, outdoor and large-scale performance venues, and theories of the avant-garde. She is a teacher of theatre and a lifelong performer. Vicki Ann Cremona is Academic Coordinator of the Theatre Studies Programme at the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta. She obtained her doctorate from the University of Provence, France. Her main areas of research are theatre policy and theatre history, particularly that connected to the themes of colonialism and identity, ritual, celebration and fests such as Carnival. Presently she is Malta’s ambassador to France. Peter Eversmann is associate professor at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Amsterdam and educational director of the School of Art, Religion and Cultural Studies of that university. He teaches and has published on the theory and history of theatre architecture as well as on empirical audience and reception research. Current research interests include the theatrical experience of the spectator as a form of aesthetic encounter, theatre iconology and cross-cultural performance analysis. Since 2003 he has been Vice President of the International Federation for Theatre Research and as such has been resposible for the working groups and the New Scholars. Temple Hauptfleisch is a former head of the Centre for SA Theatre Research (CESAT – 1979-1987) and Chair of the University of Stellenbosch Drama Department (19952005). Currently he is Director of the Centre for Theatre and Performance Studies at

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Stellenbosch (1994-) and the co-founder and current editor of the South African Theatre Journal (1987-). A member of a number of academic societies, he has served on the executive of the International Federation for Theatre Research since 1999. The most recent among his more than eighty works on the history of South African theatre, research methodology and the sociology of theatre are Theatre and Society in South Africa: Reflections in a Fractured Mirror (J.L. van Schaik, 1997), a chapter in Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames. (Eds Cremona et al. Rodopi, 2003) and a chapter on South African theatre in Kreatives Afrika: Schriftstellerlnnen über Literatur, Theater und Gesellschaft (Peter Hammer Verlag, 2005). Current projects are the Companion to South African Theatre and ongoing research with The Theatrical Event Working group of the IFTR. He is also a published Afrikaans playwright. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is an associate profesor, researcher and practitioner in the theatre department of Tel-Aviv University in Israel. She is also a trained actress who uses her acting experience in both her research and teaching. Shulamith's main interests include play theory, performance studies and cultural studies and their relation to community theatre, educational drama, drama therapy and feminist theatre. Her research on these subjects have been published in numerous periodicals in the US, Europe and Israel such as Theatre Research International, New Theatre Quarterly, Feminist Media Studies and The Drama Review. Recently, Shulamith has been focusing on developing research tools for studying community based theatre and she has just finished writing a book about community theatre in Israel. Jacqueline Martin is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT. She was formerly Head of Theatre Studies at QUT for six years. This follows eighteen years in Sweden where she was Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Stockholm (1991). She is author of Voice in Modern Theatre (1991) and co-author, together with Willmar Sauter, of Understanding Theatre: Performance Analysis in Theory and Practice (1995). An experienced teacher of actors and a director both in Australia (NIDA) and overseas, she has conducted master classes for the European League of Institutes of the Arts, Amsterdam and for the Centre for Performance Research, Cardiff. She has written widely on Performance, both physical and musical, for The Australian and for a number of international theatre journals. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Federation for International Theatre Research and former Vice-President of the Australasian Drama Studies Association. She has a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of Stockholm (1987), and has successfully supervised a number of PhD’s and Masters Theses since her return to Australia in 1994. She is the Chief Investigator on an ARC Linkage grant, Talking Theatre: Developing Theatre Audiences in Regional Queensland and the Northern Territory. She is co-convener of a working group on Performance as Research for the Federation for International Theatre Research (IFTR/FIRT). Christina Nygren is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre Studies, Stockholm University and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University. Most research on Perspectives on Popular Theatre – Bengal as religious, artistic and social context for popular theatre and dance (on Bangladesh

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and West Bengal of India) and collaborator in nationwide research project on Literature and Literary History in Global Contexts. Project Manager of a Sida financed project on Theatre for Children and Young People in China, Vietnam, Laos, India and Bangladesh. Basic studies and research at Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, China, since 1982 and at Faculty of Letters, Osaka University, Japan since 1985. Ph.D. in Theatre Studies, Stockholm University 1993. Willmar Sauter, Professor of Theatre Studies at Stockholm University, has published reception studies and written on Swedish theatre history, from Bronze Age rock carvings to contemporary performances. His interest in the theories of the theatrical event is documented in his books on performance analysis, Understanding Theatre (1995, with J. Martin), in The Theatrical Event (2000) and summarized in Eventness (2006). Willmar Sauter has been President of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR/FIRT) from 1991 to 1995 and between 1996 and 2002 he has been the Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities and since 2006 he is head of the Research School of Aesthetics at Stockholm University. Henri Schoenmakers was from 1984-2005 Professor of Theatre Studies at Utrecht University (until 2000 Chair of the Theatre, Film and Television Department). Since 2000 Professor for Theatre and Media Studies and Head of the Department of Theatre and Media Studies of the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. From 1995 – 1999 he was Vice-President of the International Federation for Theatre Research. His research is focusing on performance theory, audience and reception research, as well as on innovations in theatre in the twentieth century and the performance history of ancient Greek drama. Georgia Seffrin is currently working on cultural policy within the Brisbane City Council, Australia, the southern hemisphere’s largest local council. Prior to this she was the Artistic Development Coordinator at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, and has previously lectured and tutored at the Department of Performance Innovation, Queensland University of Technology. Georgia has also worked as an arts consultant, actor and director. This chapter is drawn from her doctoral thesis, Emerging Trends in Contemporary Festival Practice, which focuses on festival culture, particularly assessing events for young people. Part of this research has already been published in the volume Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames. Linda Streit is a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel. She is especially interested in the extensive field of drama studies; her courses include: Drama Analysis, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, and modern British Drama. She is Executive Council member of the Cameri Theatre, Israel’s leading repertory theatre, and has published articles on drama as well as reviews of Israeli theatre.

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Festivalising!

Matthias Warstat, Matthias Warstat, Dr. phil., born in 1972, has studied theatre and modern history in Berlin. Between 1998 and 2002 he worked in the interdisciplinary research program "Theatricality as a Cultural Model" and wrote his dissertation on working class festivals in the 1920s. Since 2002, he is assistant professor for theatre theory and theatre history at the theatre department of Freie Universitaet Berlin and also member of the Collaborative Research Network "Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits". Current research areas: "Crisis and Healing as paradigms of 20th century theatre" (postdoctoral thesis) / theatricality and politics / aesthetics of contemporary theatre. Recent publications: Theatrale Gemeinschaften. Zur Festkultur der Arbeiterbewegung 1918-33 (Tuebingen und Basel: A. Francke, 2005), Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie (co-edited with Erika Fischer-Lichte and Doris Kolesch, Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005). Hana Worthen is a fellow in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. She has held teaching appointments at the Charles University (Prague), Masaryk University (Brno), the University of Helsinki, and the University of Tampere. She is completing her dissertation for the Theatre Department at the University of Helsinki, entitled "Playing 'Nordic': 'The Women of Niskavuori,' Agri/Culture, and Imagining Finland on the Third Reich Stage." She is currently developing a project on racial ideologies, education, and performative culture in the Third Reich. Farah Yeganeh is a university lecturer and member of the Intl. Association of Theatre Critics, ex-member of ITI Executive Council and ex-Secretary General of ITI Iranian Centre. She has presented papers in intl. conferences including IFTR conferences, the Intl. Conference on The Performance of the Comic in Arabic Theatre in Morocco 2004, ASTR (2006); and has published articles such as “Theatre in Iran” in “World of Theatre” (Routledge, 2003) and reviews of Iranian theatre for Japan Theatre Yearbook (2003-2007); as well as the textbook “Literary Schools” (Tehran, 2003). She has been a member of the organising committee of the Intl. Seminar on “Religion and Theatre” (Tehran, Jan. 2007). Her field of interest includes Iranian traditional theatrical performances.