Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Questions in Progress

Just to get the ball rolling, here are a few questions to consider that might be useful to the project (resulting from our meetings, so far):
- what are the (TO's) cultural policies (past/present) around festivals, and cultivating the 'creative city'?
- are festivals a sign of (high) culture transgressing borders? how do festivals function within the tensions of entertainment/distraction; local/international; authenticity/commercial; representation/construction
- festivals for whom? who speaks? how do communities (self)represent? how is Toronto represented/constructed?
- what do we expect from a festival? (tracing histories of festival as a concept, individual festivals)
- what ground rules are set in place at festivals?
- how is festival space configured and to what effect?
- who writes a festival's schedule? who organizes and gives (linguistic) designations?
- what is the role of the artist/producer?
- who is the audience? how does the festival cater to the flaneur? to the family? to the citizen? (multigenerational; multicultural; etc.)

1 comment:

Jessica K said...

Hi everyone! Special thanks goes out to Taunya for setting this up and a great list of questions to get things rolling.
There seems to be a lot of press around Nuit Blanche. It might be worth while creating a file for these news stories so that there is a permanent record that everyone can access...just a thought.
Looking forward to the festivities this weekend!