Chapter 2 - Destination Festivals and the International Festival Circuit

Summary

Chapter 2 begins with the Edinburgh Festival, traditionally understood to be the progenitor of the revival of festivals in the mid twentieth century. It examines the Edinburgh, Avignon, Adelaide, Luminato (Toronto) and other destination festivals and the international trade routes they constitute as having largely outlived their usefulness for anything other than city branding, and as consistently problematic in terms of their use and representation of 'otherness'. It also considers negative and positive examples of the types of show typically featured on the festival circuit (productions/adaptations of canonical work, dance, and international collaborations). The chapter then proposes alternative and evolving destination festival models as represented by the Festival TransAmérique, the 2020 New Zealand Festival of the Arts, the 2009 Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, the Interferences Theatre Festival, and the twenty-first-century iterations of Germany’s Theater der Welt. These festivals have more successfully served as sites for intercultural negotiation and exchange.