FESTIVALS, RAVE CULTURE, COSTUME AND ESCAPISM

For the past four summers I have worked running a festival catering pitch making wood fired pizzas. In this time I have worked at a wide scope of festivals and events of all varieties and find myself constantly inspired and excited within the dynamic environment. (All photos in this post were taken by me on my adventures across a variety of events)

Something about entering a festival environment alters the psyche of those within to send them to an otherworldly headspace of increased acceptance, experimentation and hedonism tendancies. As well as this, a general feel of community and stewardship is often garnered, with the sense that all festival occupants are 'in the same boat', removed from the familiarities and sensibilities of their day to day lives and placed in a field for fun and frolicks in the spirit of escapism and pursuit of a good time.

A large part of this comes from the extraterrestrial nature of a large group of humans leaving internalised post-industrial society behind to live, sleep, eat and party outdoors in the elements for a few days, often forsaking showers and other creature comforts such as hygenic toilets and heating. In a sense festival-goers are returned to a state of pseudo-animality, or at least a loose hunter-gatherer state of dependency on preparation, resourcefulness and locally sourced essentials such as food and alcohol to keep things ticking along smoothly.
There is a beautiful simplicity of being forced, sweaty and tired, from a sun boiled tent at 8am, just the same as every other person on site, to vibe cheerfully off the festival atmosphere all afternoon and dance until the small hours, wander back to your tent and do it all again the next day and onwards, free from any further obligation or responsibility until Monday morning finally dawns and everyone packs down the small circles of tents which, for the past few days, have developed just the same familiarity as their home streets, and returns back to normality. However in the microcosm of the festival, class, wealth, profession and prejudices are all stripped away as everyone is reduced to the same dirty, intoxicated yet cheerful and brightly dressed state. People from entirely different circumstances relate to one another in ways they would otherwise potentially be resistant to in typical urbanized human culture.  One could ponder at the potential links between reconnecting people with their primary natural surroundings in such a way and the accompanying improvement in temperament and acceptance which is generated.

Festival organisers also go a long way to heighten the sense of otherworldliness with highly intricate and immersive stage and installation designs. The scope and breadth of these setups was something which really struck me across the 15 festivals I worked at in this previous summer alone. From semi-submerged dugout tunnels connecting subterranean stages to a gigantic CGI skeleton cyborg projected onto sculpted blank screens. One particular weekend which stuck out was early in the season in late May named Hogsozzle, you can find my full write up of the experience in my research file. The festival had a theme every year, which was 'Fantasy & Fairytale" this summer; as well as incredibly clever stage management within a small space, a large selection of different roaming actors were integrated in full costume to simply walk around the festival in character and interact with festivalgoers. These enhanced the ethereal nature of the event, and I noticed often employed animal imagery to distort the boundaries of normality and otherness.

It was all highly interesting to me however I found it difficult to consider aspects of this which I could integrate into my artistic practice without becoming cliche, as many of these characters were ultimately incorporaing visuals of animality or otherness to provide entertainment and bemusement to audiences instead of inspiring consideration to deeper topics. However, almost every weekend over the summer holidays I was still returning to these same dynamic environments filled with music, excitement and interesting characters around every corner and feeling very deeply inspired by the experiences I both had and also witnessed in the people around me.
Working at a specific location through the daytime hours at a festival can give you a great deal of time to people watch and analyse the way it all plays out, the level of coordination required to pull off events like these and most importantly the fundemental cultural change participants undergo while in the festival 'mindset'.

Artistic projects are also often a major feature in the festivals I visited, for both children and adults, some activities require active participation such as a workshop, others more passive such as a black van driven onto a field with some paint brushes and pens left in plain view beside and a sign saying "paint this van".
At the final festival of the summer the strength of such experiences was demonstrated to me when at the end of the night on the walk back to our tent, my friend who I was working with asked if I had done any of the weaving yet. When I said I hadn't noticed this, she led me to a sturdy wooden loom at the top of the hill with a bucket of fabric ribbons which instructed us to use the loom and get creative. She noted how at points in the weave natural material had been added from the surroundings; an entire chunk of bark or tufts of seeded grass. As we were adding our patch to the loom a man in his late fourties wandered over to see what we were doing. My friend said he should give it a try, and he stopped for five minutes to work on a small section of his own. He added a few pieces of natural material from the ground, and once his work was done, looked up and smiled, thanked us and stated what an unexpectedly lovely little experience the moment of craft was, and that he was going to bed before wandering off once more. I wondered how many similar experiences of connectivity between strangers had been galvinised by this simple act of open craft, and began to further appreciate the power of such installations.

Finally on the last day of the last festival, I spotted something that really excited me. About 10 meters ahead of the pizza tent I noticed a lady flying what appeared to be a small bluebird across the field, just below her hands. It's swift movements caught my eye so deftly that I immediately exclaimed in her direction, causing her to turn. I saw then that it was infact a small and incredibly detailed marionette, as she smiled and flew it over towards us before landing its delicate stringed legs on the front counter. It flapped twice and folded its wings inward and I was completely speechless at the ingenuity and delicacy of the creature. This was the most interesting integration of animality and otherness in a festival performance I had seen all summer, because it didn't look at incorporating aspects of these themes into human relavence through costume or acting, as within my reading I have found that human culture is inherently further reliant on, but instead projects the sense of animality into an external being which is then seen to be acting as a character in it's own right. Even with thin strings suspending every limb, the delicate form of the bird still held a sense of unpredictablitiy, as if in a second it might alight and to never be seen again.

I felt like in seeing this puppet, even on a very small but beautifully intricate scale, I was having a more tangible encounter with otherness than any number of animal shaped headress or other fantastical representations.