Festivals and spaces

Now that I have arrived in Avignon, I feel frustrated. The major part of my frustration comes from knowing how lacking my home is in festivals like this. I’ve found many of my classmates agree that the Fringe is a disappointment when compared to Avignon. The Fringe festival lacks an actual feeling of festivity. Last night after seeing Les Parisiens, Sam and I went to dinner at a restaurant in the square and wandered through the walled city. It was packed full of people and lights all gathering around food and drinks, vendors selling toys and sweets, a carousel, and street performers. I saw a tap dancer who had been dancing for hours, a classical dance group, breakdancers, folks setting up for a fire show, a saxophone and drum team that were nearly impossible to walk away from, and a guitarist. All of this among a festival of both high-tier plays and the hundreds of off-Avignon, Fringe-like shows being advertised in the street. People were revelling in the event of the festival--were engaging in the “unbridled sociality” that gives these events “their distinctive quality as spaces of celebration and escape from the mundane, orderly nature of everyday living” (Bakhtin ref. in Bennett and Woodward, 11). This is the kind of energy that the Toronto Fringe lacks. Even the Fringe Club, the apparent hub of the so-called festival, seems, frankly, not very fun. When I attended with my classmates, there were neat events going on--a life drawing workshop and a live music performance, plus a few vendors present--but the place was not very full. This was possibly due to a forecast of rain, but in terms of energy it also seemed empty. Of everyone present, practically no one was watching the live music, and I barely felt compelled to listen. The life drawing-class was subdued. I plan to elaborate more on why this was in future writing, but my current theory is simply that the Toronto Fringe is too spread out, that venues are too disconnected from the rest for there to be any real sense of cohesion or community among the audience. It also lacks the festive atmosphere of the street festival.There is not enough activity in a small enough location for that hedonistic sense of liminal, festival sociality to occur. For the future, I am thinking of this: how can we make the Fringe a festive festival? How can we make the Fringe fun?

Works Cited

Bennett and Woodward. “Festival Spaces, Identity, Experience and Belonging”. The Festivalization of Culture. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. 2014. 11-22.