The Art of Festivals
Innovation is flourishing in the global arts and culture sector, and nowhere is the bloom more apparent than at a festival. Though festivals are credited for their spectacle and organisation, these spaces are also home to the latest innovative practices in the industry. Festival organisers find innovative ways to excite attendees, improve quality of life during the event, and contribute to the arts and culture scene as a whole.
Curating a festival is curating a scene
When festival organisers list featured acts on their roster, they uplift artists and groups as the idols of their subculture. For the Montreux Jazz Festival, the playbill is a spectrum. Known as an innovative genre of music, jazz embraces a wide array of sounds and welcomes musicians with roots in soul, blues, hip-hop and pop.
Edinburgh Fringe Festival pushes back against the prestige curation of arts festivals. After a group of performers was rejected from Edinburgh International Festival, they staged their performances on the “fringe” of the festival anyway. Now, the official Edinburgh Festival Fringe prides itself on offering “art of every genre” and keeping its Festival Fringe Society from vetting the programme.
Parades for specific communities can also uplift local organisations as beacons of trust for community members. Organisations who sent processions to the Sydney Mardi Gras present themselves as safe havens for LGBTQ+ people. Festival curation can thus impact groups in significant ways.
Entertainment reaching new heights
Festivals have long been credited for their spectacle, a pressure which organisers meet by rising to new heights in entertainment each year.
A traditional sporting event in Belgium – called the International Bathtub Regatta – consists of a fleet of decorated bathtubs floating down the river Meuse, propelled only by human force. Each year, participants must find more unique and original ways to decorate and propel their tub.
Similarly, participants in Rio’s Carnival event must find more unique and original ways to decorate their floats for the festival’s parade each year. The League of Samba Schools (LIESA) ranked the top school in the 2023 parade as Imperatriz Leopoldinense, who boasted an aerospace-themed float complete with hot air balloons and a da-Vincian flying machine.
Launched in 1998, the Boryeong Mud Festival innovates in entertainment activities for its attendees. The festival celebrates the Boryeong mud flats with attractions including a mud pool, mud slides, a mud marathon, coloured mud for body painting, a “mud prison”, “mud basket”, and mud skiing competitions.
Bringing ancient festivity into the modern day
Many festivals have ancient, religious or spiritual, origins. Semana Santa festival refers to Holy Week in Spain, when Catholic religious brotherhoods perform penance processions on the street. While this event remains largely unchanged in time, some religious practices have widened in appeal to non-religious festivalgoers.
Holi Festival celebrates the love of the god Radha and Krishna, as well as the victory of Vishnu as Narasimha Narayana over Hiranyakashipu, in Hindu tradition. However, it has also been treated as a playful cultural event in which participants throw coloured water at friends and strangers. This practice has been adopted at other events including Australian Fun Runs.
Songkran Water Festival has faced a similar dissemination of culture, originally celebrating the Thai new year according to a Buddhist folk myth. When a two-day festival in the style of Songkran was planned in Singapore, the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) Deputy Governor for Tourism Products claimed that Thailand holds exclusive rights to celebrate Songkran and threatened to sue; the event was later altered.
Innovation in supply
As the climate crisis prompts individuals and organisations to reduce their own emissions, festival organisers have found sustainable ways to supply their attendees with quality-of-life needs. La Tomatina – an annual, single-day, city-wide tomato fight – purchases tomatoes for a low price from the Extremadura region of Spain. They only use tomatoes deemed unfit for consumption, thus reducing waste.
Melbourne’s Rising festival worked with Green My Plate to allow vendors and attendees to reuse crockery, rather than providing single-use plastics.
“We drop off the plates and bowls to the food vendors. You then order your noodles or your burger, whatever food it is, and it is served up on a plate or in a bowl,” Green My Plate’s Jess Fleet explained of the system.
“When you’re done, you return that plate or bowl into one of our Green My Plate bins, and then we wash and reuse.”
Glastonbury festival has announced multiple innovative supply practices over the years, including Wi-Fi statues in 2014 and transparent toilet cubicles in 2015. The toilet installation featured a two-way mirror to remind attendees that only one third of the world’s population has access to the privacy and comfort of a bathroom.
