Chapter 14 - International Festivals in Latin America

Summary

This chapter begins with an overview of international festivals in the region before moving into a detailed examination of the often-competing dynamics and complexities operating within today’s Latin American theatre festival. The chapter centres on two of the region’s major festivals – Chile’s annual Santiago a Mil Festival and Argentina’s biannual Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires – in order to illustrate fundamental differences that range from origins to institutional and funding structures to programming decisions and even to individual festivals’ varied relationships to the international cultural marketplace. Albeit easily dismissed as ‘encuentros vitrina’ (display- or show-case encounters), and despite having cemented a professional and commercial inter-festival relationship in recent years, the two festivals converge and diverge significantly, thus offering insights into the challenges and opportunities found in contemporary Latin American theatre festivals when positioned within the international festival circuits.