International Festival Research Conference - September 2008
8. May, 2009
In September 2008 delegates from Finland, Croatia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Norway met in Kristiansand, Norway, in order to discuss and prepare for a joint comparative study of festivals from national and regional perspectives, a project called FESTIVALS.
Our project will be evidence based and will concentrate on outlining and defining how unharnessed “creativity” could be transformed into controlled, applied and purposeful “innovation”. Our common task is to produce, through research, a reflective socio-cultural awareness of the festival form in its creative arena and our conclusions should aim toward a outlining the effects and benefits, in addition to the difficulties, of festivals and how these qualities can be applied and overcome into an effective industry.
It is considered that festivals, whether urban or rural, placed in the peripheral or in the centre, specialized or broadly based and representing various aesthetics, values and tastes is an important driver for local and national cultures, social groups, businesses, regional development, policy-strategies, tradition, organization-structures, investment-opportunities, consumer habits and development in the local community. The study hopes to discover what effects festivals have, so that this might be applied to create model for more effective festival planning and effects.
At our meeting we discussed what a ‘creative industry’ is, how it has developed in the participating countries and how the concept could be useful within a festival-context as well as considering where spontaneous creativity contradicts this notion of industry. In addition, the conference also discussed how the HERA funding application for the project should refer to our transnational and comparative studies of creativity and innovation specifically within festival research for the countries involved, their specific festival cases and their public and private partners.
Through the many examples discussed at the conference, it was agreed that a festival is an important social and cultural arena for the choices and practices of creativity, and where these different processes are furthered and hindered. If these processes are analyzed they might give us meaningful information on how concepts of innovation can be defined, with barriers to creativity overcome and productive models for festivals created and applied.
