Invited Talk at University of Leeds

Description

Presented talk: Performing culture: Arts festivals as cultural relations
Abstract: Festivals, whether curated or open, connect artists with audiences. Festivals are also a key tool in cultural diplomacy and are used to cultivate relations and enhance understanding between countries and peoples. In this study, I examine a ten-year programme, which acted as a cultural broker, around Edinburgh's festivals to innovate through developing artistic collaborations for new works or transferring existing works to new contexts, and also engaging in cultural change through establishing relations between people and countries. The data provide an opportunity to examine natural experiments where two different approaches were employed and overlapped: a focus on developing country relations through art versus a focus on specific art forms that engaged in different countries and led to distinct approaches for cultivating relations and outcomes in terms of types of collaborations.

Period	9 Mar 2022
Held at	University of Leeds, United Kingdom