WELCOME TO THE SHIVA HOUSE. Co-written, -directed, and -performed by Benjamin Behrend and Logan Gabrielle Schulman. Philadelphia Fringe Festival, virtual performance. September 12, 2020.
Roman Dolzhanskiy speaks to James Rowson about the challenges of organising international theatre festivals in Russia during the COVID-19 pandemic and discusses how the New European Theatre (NET) ...Festival and Territory Festival have navigated the complex and frequently changing public safety restrictions in Russia.
From the point of view of the author Hilkka-Liisa Iivanainen, the co-artistic director of Finland's Tampere Theatre Festival, the purpose of a performing arts festival is fundamentally challenged by ...the unforeseen and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In Tampere, the festival's core mission of coming together to celebrate theatre as an art form has almost become secondary to the constantly changing protective measures and regulations. Moreover, the pressure to make a strategic shift into digital or hybrid execution has profoundly changed the practice and goals of curating. After a cancelled festival edition in August 2020 and a downsized festival in August 2021, Iivanainen is rethinking the kinds of paradoxes hidden in the attempt to stay timely as a theatre festival.
This article discusses experimental translation on the example of intralingual translation in the Play On! Translation project accompanying the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and ...intersemotic/intermedial translation in the OMGShakespeare series and Star Trek-related texts. These are approached as exercises in post-translation as defined by Edwin Gentzler in his volume on the subject.
Purpose
Researchers have become aware of the importance of festivals as a phenomenon worthy of studying, but in-depth studies of cultural festivals are lacking. The purpose of this study is to ...describe the attributes of cultural festivals, specifically theatre festivals and examine the motivations to organise them. Similarly, this study seeks to discover the type of tourist that attends these types of festivals.
Design/methodology/approach
A questionnaire was applied to a representative sample of tourists who visited one of the most prestigious festivals in the international panorama: Almagro International Festival of Classical Theatre. A non-probabilistic technical sample was used. Tabulation of the data was performed by the study group using the SPSS, v. 23.
Findings
This study makes a segmentation of the tourists who attend the festival based on their motivations. Using this segmentation, the authors analyse the socio-demographic characteristics and tourists’ behaviour, as well as their experience at the festival. Amongst the higher-rated attributes of the festival are care and service organisation and interpretative quality of the actors and/or theatre company.
Research limitations/implications
The main practical application of this study is to help understand the peculiarities of each segment of visitors and their evaluation of the destination to create tourist and cultural products that provide greater satisfaction with respect to their needs.
Originality/value
The main value is the novelty of studying this kind of cultural event. The authors analyse the reasons to visit it in relation to the motivations that move the visitors. The authors also study the assessment the tourist does of the qualities of the festival.
This thesis maps the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) in its social, political, economic and cultural contexts from its inception in 1981 until 2016. Founded by Rose de Wend Fenton and ...Lucy Neal, LIFT established an innovative festival form that sought to create social, political and artistic change by presenting high-quality, avant-garde international theatre and performance throughout London. By locating the innovations of LIFT in the sociopolitical context of its creation and in direct relation to historical developments, it argues that international theatre festivals can act as catalysts for change through transforming ways of seeing and being, produced in and productive of the broader societal landscape. Opening with a historical perspective on LIFT, this thesis first gives context to its emergence in the 1980s and the role of international theatre festivals as they were first introduced into the field of theatre. It then examines LIFT’s development through four decades up to the present day, examining its shifting positions in the field. Methodologically rooted in the framework of the sociology of the theatre, the thesis interweaves archival research and primary observations with an exploration of the sociological, economic and political factors that have driven the creation and evolution of international theatre festivals in Britain. The thesis explores the dominant influence of neoliberal ideology in all contemporary areas of British life, arguing that their principles interpenetrate the field of cultural production to the extent that limits the possibilities of festivals achieving their full social purpose. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of culture and Maria Shevtsova’s development of Bourdieu’s theory in relation to theatre, provides the theoretical frame of the thesis.
The Gateshead International Festival of Theatre (GIFT) has been running since 2011. It is an annual opportunity for audiences and artists to gather and share experimental work with a strong focus on ...collaboration and conversation. As noted in my interview with the Festival's Director, Kate Craddock (which is also published in this special issue of CTR), it went online for 2020 and 2021. 2022 marked its return to in-person activity. I attended almost all of the events in the programme, which stretched across three days from Friday 30 April to Sunday 2 May 2022.
Gateshead International Festival of Theatre (GIFT) is an annual festival of contemporary performance in Gateshead, in the North East of England. It was founded in 2011 to provide a platform for ...contemporary performance in the region and as a creative response to Gateshead town centre's redevelopment. It includes performances, workshops, discussions, and other informal ways for artists and audiences to come together.
