Space and Culture

Space and Culture http://sac.sagepub.com Edinburgh: The Festival Gaze and Its Boundaries Kirstie Jamieson Space and Culture 2004; 7; 64 DOI: 10.1177/1206331203256853 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/1/64 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Space and Culture can be found at: Email Alerts: http://sac.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://sac.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from http://sac.sagepub.com at GLASGOW CALEDONIAN UNIVERSITY on October 4, 2007 © 2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. EThdein bTuitlreg hGoes Here The Festivalsubtitle goesGaze here and Its Boundaries The Author goes here Body text Kirstie Jamieson This article examines the temporal and spatial boundaries of Edinburgh’s festival identity. It un- ravels Edinburgh’s festivals in terms of the spaces and identities they produce and their functions. Although there is no one definitive standpoint from which a festival city such as Edinburgh can be objectively mapped, the bounded appeal of live performance, outdoor reveling, and alternative ways of using the city during festival time reveal how the festival gaze manipulates urban identity, public space, and play. By engaging with the spatiality of Edinburgh’s festival culture, the festival identity upon which the city self-consciously relies is explored through the concepts of carniva- lesque, play, and the transformation of identity. Keywords: festival gaze; Bakhtin; urban identity; spectacle; revelry; cosmopolitan Festival time signals jostling crowds, overspilling bars, and cacophonies of multi- lingual conversations. The scale and chaotic feel of “Edinburgh the Festival City” comes alive at the end of July with The Edinburgh International Jazz and Blues Festival followed by The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The Edinburgh International Book Festival, The Edinburgh International Film Festival, The Edinburgh Tattoo, The Edinburgh Inter- national Festival, and The Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival. For 6 weeks, a thriving street life brings tourists, performers, and residents into proximity where difference in appearance, language, and behavior becomes the norm of city center public life. As thousands of professional festival performers in lavish costumes shout bombas- tically into the crowds, the decorum that usually characterizes this city dissolves and space & culture vol. 7 no. 1, february 2004 64-75 DOI: 10.1177/1206331203256853 ©2004 Sage Publications 64 Downloaded from http://sac.sagepub.com at GLASGOW CALEDONIAN UNIVERSITY on October 4, 2007 © 2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Edinburgh 65 Edinburgh self-consciously adopts the identity of “The Festival City.”A framed spon- taneous play which contrasts routine everyday life is observably squandered in the dedicated time and place of Edinburgh’s festival season. Colorful photocopied flyers that promise exciting new theatrical shows decorate the cobbled historic High Street. The medieval old quarter of the city center becomes a stage where professional street performers shout over layers of cheers and laughter, inscribing their presence on the city through movement and performance. Festival programs are thrust into the laps of tourists as they sit in street cafes to watch the politely bohemian festival culture unveil itself. For most visitors, this will be the first introduction to the city’s festival gaze. However, behind the animated street scenes, the gaze is influenced by stakeholders, institutions of local government, and an expanding service economy, which benefit from the promotion of the festivals’ playfulness and liminality. The success of the festival season’s unbounded creative expression is bounded by the topography of festivalized spaces. Although spaces appear as though spontaneously formed by the com- pany of strangers and the collective experience of performances, the city en fête is also the result of painstaking planning by a city administration that seeks to control the ways in which public spaces change. The city is nonetheless redefined by the altered energy and velocity of strategi- cally planned festivalized spaces. An es- tablished tradition of festival culture and the more illusory qualities of play and spontaneity produce identities and iden- tification with this festival city. Festivals generate regulated and liminal spaces in the city’s cultural calendar and insinuate Edinburgh’s cultural ambience, sociabil- ity, and prestige in the global hierarchy of celebrated cultural cities. Fig. 1. Street Entertainer in the midst of busy festival crowd 2002. Reveling Through Time Festivals and spectacular events serve discourses of “city branding” and the “creative industries” in a competitive global context where “culture” provides the discur- sive linchpin linking creative practices, formerly regarded as “the arts,”with economic- led, postindustrial, globalized urban repertoires (Jayne, 2000). Theming and place marketing of cities has become a central feature of the political economy of tourism, urban regeneration, and gentrification projects (O’Connor & Wynne, 1996; Zukin, 1982, 1996). In the race to win investment and tourism, Edinburgh mines its cultural resources and charismatic urban images, defining itself visually by either images of the castle or the city during its festival season. Defined by the imposed order of urban stakeholders, Edinburgh constitutes what de Certeau (1984) regards as a “concept city” that simplifies the contingencies and multiplicities of city life to convey an ap- pealing unified impression. Within today’s competitive urban context, Edinburgh’s culture, heritage, and public spaces are regarded as assets that add rich social refer- ences to the lexicon of city marketing campaigns. Downloaded from http://sac.sagepub.com at GLASGOW CALEDONIAN UNIVERSITY on October 4, 2007 © 2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 66 space and culture/february 2004 In this sense, culture is used to articulate cultivated cultural activities that are di- rected and developed according to social and economic objectives. Just as culture has been discursively reconfigured according to economic and managerialist logic (McGuigan, 1996), so now festivals are increasingly written into civic cultural policies as both product and framework, designed to attract a wealthy target market and fur- nish the city with a competitive image. In cultural planning discourse, the promotional use of urban festivals serves the consumer demands of a “tourist city” (Evans, 2001). As a site of tourist consumption, Edinburgh promotes its festivities and liberal approach to street entertainment, alcohol, and late licenses as inducements designed to attract mobile capital (Harvey, 1994). The origins of Edinburgh’s festivalized disposition are embedded in a set of dis- tinctive economic and political relations quite dissimilar to the promotional and com- modified status of Edinburgh’s more recent festival additions.1 Edinburgh’s “cultural disposition” provides it with its sense of place and is the result of a distinct “constella- tion of relations,”articulated together at “a particular locus” (Massey, 1993, p. 66). The relations of Edinburgh’s festival identity can be traced to the particular locus of 1947 when many European cities that had formerly been known for their impressive archi- tecture and high cultural exports were in ruins. The Scotsman newspaper told of how “Salzburg, Munich and other pre-war festival centres on the continent of Europe are likely to be out of action for an indefinite period” (“Festival News,” 1945). Edinburgh had escaped the devastation of bombs, and unscathed by mortar, it proudly clung to its Enlightenment aspirations of being internationally recognized as the “Athens of the North.” In that year, Edinburgh hosted the first “Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama.” The first program of high cultural performances codified cultural alliances and affinities of taste that symbolically transcended the geographies of war. Postwar, Edinburgh’s first international festival reestablished communities of high culture and conferred legitimacy to the spatial and temporal structure of arts festivals in the city. Edinburgh’s celebration of European high culture provided the opportunity for the Vienna Philharmonic to publicly reunite for the first time since 1938, performing for an elite and supportive audience. The “International” culture to which the Vienna Philharmonic belonged was a canonized European cultural sphere to which access was reserved for those with a social background comfortable with the conventions of high culture and “the arts.” The political change of the 1940s and the introduction of wel- fare capitalism with the associated desire to extend “good” culture to everyone en- dorsed the culture of Edinburgh’s International Festival and validated the grounds for future state funding. This specific context supplied the justification for the first festival, which relied upon a belief in the inherent value of high culture and which the state would support only a few years later, on the basis that a civilizing and ennobling culture was for everybody (Sinfield, 1989). From

Load more