Woodstock

• And after multiple summers without large in-person gatherings and reduced capacities, many people are returning to their favourite music festivals to have a good time.
• But these gatherings, especially independent and artist-run music festivals, do more than entertain.
• To help us tackle these questions, we organized a conference about music festivals and had conversations with scholars, practitioners, artists, organizers and festival-goers who shared their insights about curating, programming and imagining music festivals.

Curating for change

• In her book, The Work of Art in the World, she encourages readers to trace the “ripple effects” of the arts into our daily institutions and practices.
• She asks readers to think about ways to “test, stretch and refine” how we teach, learn and curate.
• Simply put, what does it mean to curate for change?

Staging diversity, challenging power

• Music festivals are important not only in terms of programming matters, but also as forms of community-based education and activism.
• In other words, festivals can build alternative visions of social co-operation and can question static relations of power and taken-for-granted representations.
• Another example, the Guelph Jazz Festival, launched in 1994, aims to reinvigorate public life with the spirit of dialogue and community.

Everyday utopias

• While it may be tempting to think about festivals as an escape from everyday life, we also see them as transformative possibilities for society.
• We are drawn to legal scholar Davina Cooper’s notion of everyday utopias.
• “Everyday utopias,” she writes, “don’t place their energy on pressuring mainstream institutions to change, on winning votes, or on taking over dominant social structures.