OPINION ARTICLES

Festivals or rituals?
Festival politics, religiosity and sociability,
or
The importance of the court jester.

Part XII – Spectacle.
From global festivalisation to the tension between spectatorship and participation

There has been a focus on the replacement of traditional local culture by globalised popular culture and the transition from ritual to spectacle, the result of the wider development of festivalisation, which represents the symbolic transformation of public space into a particular form of cultural consumption.

Urban spectacles are spectacular public displays, including festivals and mega-events, which involve capitalist markets, sets of social relations and flows of commodities, capital, technology, cultural forms and people across borders, being produced and managed by bureaucratic organisations for instrumental purposes, especially tourism-oriented revitalisation.

Various forms, types and technologies of spectacle have spread and new cultural strategies of economic redevelopment are becoming common features of cities in which consumption and leisure become experiences to be consumed, collected and exhibited.

Society, in a new phase of capitalism, has become saturated with commercial and entertainment images. Spectacle, particular public events, high-profile extravaganzas and urban spaces, or theatrical presentation and controlled visual production, which is the antithesis of a spontaneous festival, is neither a set of geographic sites nor a collection of images, but a social relationship mediated by images.

The spectacle is a conceptual extension of the phenomenon of reification, a process of “objectification” or “thingification” of social relations and products that extends to the production and consumption of images. Individuals view and experience the “image society” as passive spectators, forced to consume images that are produced by others with ulterior motives, usually profit motives and bureaucratic control.

The contemporary city is the locus of conflicts and struggles over the spectacle, in which it is a space of consumer exploitation juxtaposed with the space of collective resistance and revolutionary struggle. Large-scale public rituals, such as theatre, generally constitute spectacles in themselves.

The spectacle is a cultural institution and a social process structured to accomplishing specific goals in a society, and can be defined as a visual part of the aura around a remarkable or lavish display that is, itself, consumed by an audience. It is a useful concept for thinking about the source of ritual efficacy – the human psyche, socialised to perceive its own transformation through ritual action – and about how power, role reversal and festivity operate in public celebrations.

Spectacle constitutes both performance in itself and an aspect of performances. In modern festivals, audiences and artists often coincide in ritualised spectacle. The mimetic quality of ritual performances is integral to what makes them potentially capable of capturing the senses, as well as rendered spectacular. As actions are repeated or ritualised, they become increasingly open to creative possibilities and to experimentation. These actions are variable within the acceptable limits of behaviour.

Beyond Carnival, other themes that emerge and illuminate a concept of ritualised spectacle include ribald sexuality, humour, and reversal; masking and cross-dressing; and tourism and the commodification of culture.

“Sensory overload often abounds in festive and public events like carnivals, many of which can be characterized as ‘‘urban spectacles’’ (Gotham 2005). Beyond the visual, sound and smell are amplified in, and integral to much spectacle (…) body temperature and body heat also become sensorial aspects of spectacles. Spectacles feature arresting sounds as well. During a typical festival, music, cacophony, or language may be at play in disseminating the message of a festival.” (Addo, 2009, p.229)

For utterances or actions to be ritually efficacious, they must set up the appropriate conditions for agents to receive them as such, and the spectacle is one of these ritual conditions. Spectacles, as great performances of human authorship, exhibit a specific, effervescent and inspiring quality, and are characterised as striking performances with an acutely festive behavioural edge.

The cultural processes that lead to the development of humans’ propensities to communicate through rites are evolutionarily linked to phylogenetic processes that give rise to ceremonies in animals.

Humans do not have a monopoly on the production of deliberate and conscious behaviour that is effective for survival. Humans may be evolutionarily predisposed to produce ritualistic behaviour to bring relief from social stress and to ensure that survival is reflected in the life force, giving meaning to ritualised spectacles.

There is a distinction between festivals based on the concert-model and festivals based on a social experience model. The main phenomenon of this distinction is the transformation, through artistic means, of consumers into producers, of spectators into participants.

Spectatorship is associated with the inauthenticity and passivity that characterise the concert-model and remove the locus of control from the audience. The concert-model is thus focused on the action that takes place around a main stage with presentation performances that, despite allowing for a subjective mind and an expressive body, adopt an organisational and spatial structure that restricts the audience’s control.

Conceptualising festival audiences as actively involved is pointless. Festivals like Leeds and Reading are concert-model events because they represent a formula for the commercial utilisation of high-profile artists as cultural capital, which translates into measurable capital for the promoter, contributing to ticket sales and media attention. Although this formula is simpler, by focussing its attention on the main stage, it relies heavily on the record industry, is extremely competitive, involves high costs and can make auxiliary attractions unnecessary.

The concealment of creative production and its removal from the public eye makes it possible to argue that the role of the public is restricted to that of spectator and consumer. The concert-model reproduces a particular social relationship, creating a separation between the artist and the public. It is questionable whether festivals that emphasise spectatorship produce a carnivalesque, participatory and actively involved audience.

Hybrid events with an online slant, which have been pointed out as an alternative, today with (more) participatory tools, need to implement anonymity to guarantee participation, raise identity issues, and don’t address the organic nature of the festival, which is detrimental on a transpersonal level.

The public’s participatory activity is assumed through the involvement of physical bodily expressions. Passivity is seen as a form of participation subordinated to the brain, while activity is expressive, communicative and intentional. A strictly subjective view cannot be denied, this perspective does not allow for the recognition of important nuances in festival forms and contemporary modes of participation, such as the existence of autonomous temporary zones that exist outside of economic mechanisms and dissolve the artist/audience distinction by demystifying the artist and democratising art, and the carnivalesque, which inverts accepted social norms and hierarchies, unlike the concert-model performances.

In the concert-model festival, there remains a uniformity of participation implicit in its programme and spatial architecture, and in its concealment from production. Interpretations of the activity and passivity of the audience are replaced by an emphasis on the locus of control, through a verification of how audiences directly influence the content of the event, which brings us back to the modes of participation and the patterns of paidia and ludus theatricality.

While in the ludus pole, audience participation is restricted to spectatorship, in the paidia pole the audience is allowed a theatricality, bringing it closer to performance, allowing it to influence the form of the event and a transition between the role of spectator and participant, forging the spectacle of the event itself.

In fact, the extent to which the dominance of spectatorship in the audience experience is assumed, rejected or resisted by each event largely determines its individual characteristics.

“Witnessing spectacle is more reductive than experiencing the festive from which spectacle is produced. Perhaps this is why human beings and their fellow primate cousins seem to delight in creating the participatory show that is spectacle. (…) the myriad, true meanings and histories of festivities are accessible mainly by repeatedly participating in them, while maintaining a sense of their transformative potential for oneself. That is, we understand festivities best by recognizing them as rituals while consuming them as spectacles. If ritual plays a basic biological and cultural role in ensuring a continued human propensity towards social integration and reinforcement in highly differentiated societies, then spectacle must continue to be examined as a useful tool for thinking about the historical and cross-cultural efficacy of ritual in human experiences of, and with, power.” (Addo, 2009, p.231-232)

In this framework, the balance between spectatorship and participation becomes a critical variable in defining the festival experience.

Bibliography:

ADDO, Ping-Ann (2009) “Anthropology, Festival, and Spectacle”, Reviews in Anthropology, 38:3, pp.217-236.

BATHER, Steve (s.d.) “Innovation in Hybrid Events: New Meeting Tools  That Increase Audience Engagement and Commitment To Results”, Meeting Sphere.

CRESPI-VALLBONA, Montserrat e RICHARDS, Greg (2007) “The Meaning of Cultural Festivals”, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 13:1, pp.103-122.

GOTHAM, Kevin Fox (2005) “Theorizing urban spectacles. Festivals, tourism and the transformation of urban space”, City, 9:2, pp.225-246.

YEGANEGY, Roxanne (2012) The Politics of Participation: Burning Man and British Festival Culture, Tese de Doutoramento, Leeds: University of Leeds.

Authorship: João Carvalho [1].

Based on the project work “Business plan. Cosmic Festival. Transformational Festival”, authored by João Carvalho, under the supervision of Specialist Professor Victor Afonso and co-supervision of PhD Professor Nuno Gustavo, for completion of the Master’s Degree in Tourism, with a specialisation in Strategic Event Management, at the Estoril Higher Institute for Hospitality and Tourism Studies. Presented and defended on December 27th, 2019.

May, 2020.

[1] Master’s Degree in Tourism, with specialisation in Strategic Event Management, by Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies; Beach Break®.