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Throughout the world festivals are growing – in numbers, in size, in significance – and serve as spaces where aesthetic encounters, religious and political celebrations, economic investments and public entertainment can take place. In this sense, festivals are theatrical events. This volume contains discussions of 14 diverse festival events from five continents across the globe, written by members of the IFTR/FIRT Working Group on the Theatrical Event, the same group that has produced the ground-breaking study Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames in 2004 (also published by Rodopi). The events discussed here range from traditional carnivals and festivals to more controversial theatre, dance and opera festivals, children's festivals and community events, as well as saints' and workers' festivities. All of these constitute part of the local playing cultures and take on significant political roles, nationally and regionally. The authors explore and extend the theoretical frames of reference for any contemporary discussion of theatrical events and festivals, in order to provide a new and fresh perspective on past and present festival culture across the globe.

Throughout the world festivals are growing – in numbers, in size, in significance – and serve as spaces where aesthetic encounters, religious and political celebrations, economic investments and public entertainment can take place. In this sense, festivals are theatrical events. This volume contains discussions of 14 diverse festival events from five continents across the globe, written by members of the IFTR/FIRT Working Group on the Theatrical Event, the same group that has produced the ground-breaking study Theatrical Events – Borders Dynamics Frames in 2004 (also published by Rodopi). The events discussed here range from traditional carnivals and festivals to more controversial theatre, dance and opera festivals, children's festivals and community events, as well as saints' and workers' festivities. All of these constitute part of the local playing cultures and take on significant political roles, nationally and regionally. The authors explore and extend the theoretical frames of reference for any contemporary discussion of theatrical events and festivals, in order to provide a new and fresh perspective on past and present festival culture across the globe.

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.