The festival is a theatrical event

Abstract

Are contemporary festivals an empty spectacle? George Steiner for one suggested in a 1996 address that closing down of the Edinburgh Festival would be ‘rare but vivid mark of honesty within excellence’. The contemporary world no longer had a need for festivals as symbols of ‘the credo of a community or the aspirations of a political regime,’ he argued.1 This critique of the festival as a ‘meaning-free zone’ seems to be linked with a kind of revulsion at the range of excesses often associated with the phenomenon of festival in the contemporary industrialized world, and the argument goes that these excesses tend to obscure and in fact diminish the ‘original purpose’ of festivals as we have understood it via various anthropological and sociological discourses.