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Limiting liminality. Experiencing Pol’and’Rock outside the fence

Marta Kupis

Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Poland

The 27th edition of Pol’and’Rock Festival (formerly known as Station Woodstock) in 2021 took place in very unique circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic may not be over yet, but in Poland many restrictions have been loosened in light of the vaccination program, and cultural events are coming back to life. In the case of Pol’and’Rock – “the most beautiful festival in the world” –  this meant a break from last year’s very harsh restrictions, but continuation of those still in place. Most importantly, this included a limited audience (up to 20,000 people, including 250 without valid vaccination certificates) which meant that for the first time in the festival’s nearly thirty year history it was necessary to buy tickets. Unfortunately, I did not gain entry. Fortunately, this allowed me a glimpse into the less formal side of how the festival’s fans were coping with a situation of ‘twofold liminality’ they found themselves in.

Pol’and’Rock’s official mascot – Andrzej

My selfie taken with the 27th Pol’and’Rock Instagram filter

The underlying theoretical perspective framing this description of Pol’and’Rock’s 27th edition is that of liminality as developed by Victor Turner. This applies both to the general situation of the event – standing in between last year’s very strict limitations and a slow “return to normality” – and the unique case of those people who could only gain partial access to the concerts. At the same time, music festivals themselves were frequently analyzed through the lens of liminality and ritual, including by Turner (1982) himself. Classically, liminality has been understood as a state “in between”. The liminal phase of a ritual is characterized as a time when a person, usually a participant of a ritual of passage, is already beyond a pre-liminal stage, such as childhood, but not yet accepted as a member of a post-liminal stage, for example adulthood.

In the context depicted here, pre-liminality is understood as, on the one hand, the state of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying restrictions (as a side note, it is worth noting that they themselves can be viewed as a liminal stage), while the post-liminal phase is the hopeful time following its end. Of course, this framing is somewhat questionable. For example, there is no specific moment in time or a threshold in the number of vaccinated people that would mark the definite end of the coronavirus epidemic, and an increasing number of medical specialists are pointing out that many of the behaviours developed in this time are likely to be here to stay. Nevertheless, for a layperson’s imagination “return to normality” would be marked by being once again allowed to participate in social gatherings and cultural events, and as such here it is understood in this way. In this context, liminality is viewed as the unique circumstances when some events are allowed to take place, but many restrictions are still in place. On the other hand, this text also focuses on the group of people who would like to partake in the festive ritual but could not join the actual festival with its spatially restricted campsite and good access to live music. With this framework in mind, it seems appropriate to move onto the description of the festival itself, as well as the unique group analyzed here.

An attempt to create a sense of online community. An official list of all participants, created by one of the festival’s partners.

The 27th Pol’and’Rock Festival took place between 29th and 31st July 2021 in a new location, Płoty in West Pomerania. Through strict formal entry procedures, the event was very well protected from anyone with coronavirus. Most importantly, for the first time in the famously free festival’s history tickets were introduced, and identified with the name and surname of the person entering to prevent them being resold outside the official capacity. The entry fees were low at 50 zlotys (around 12 Euros) and were distributed in a number corresponding to those currently allowed at social gatherings in Poland, that is 20,000 participants, including 250 unvaccinated people. Additionally, everyone including those with a vaccination certificate was tested for the virus before entering for free, but anyone leaving and re-entering the campsite was required to take the test again, but this time with a payment. It should be noted that the festival infrastructure was well organized, especially considering that it was the first time it took place in a new location. Special trains were travelling between Szczecin and Kołobrzeg, and the festival-goers were picked up from the train station by buses, which would take them to a spot a short distance away from the actual festival space. The line-up of Pol’and’Rock included performers both from Poland – such as Dżem, Raz Dwa Trzy, Renata Przemyk, Pidżama Porno or Kroke – and from all across the world, including Morgane Ji and Slift, with the latter giving their first concert in Poland (Zespoły, z którymi planujemy spotkanie na Festiwalu, n.d.).

Pol’and’Rock’s Instagram story with an infographic on how to approach COVID-19 test

Unfortunately, I could not obtain a ticket. While the organizers were insisting that watching and interacting with the event online – on YouTube, Discord or Twitch – is “just as valid” a form of participation in the festival, and indeed those on stage would make callouts to what was written online. It appears that for many this type of participation proved insufficient, or felt somehow incomplete. The advantages of this sorry circumstance proved to be quite rewarding for me, though. First, I probably would have never taken interest in the contests organized by the festival’s partners, which turned out to be an interesting way of activating the potential audience’s creativity. Those who would like to try their chance at winning the tickets were asked to, for example, create unique wishes for an unknown participant or say what they cannot imagine their summer without. Secondly, and more importantly, I had a glimpse into the grey area which emerged around Pol’and’Rock. Many people would come without a ticket, hoping to get one by the entrance or to be allowed into the campsite without one, but were firmly, though politely, turned away by the volunteers. In fact,  they would even suggest to me that I join some of the people already present in their “alternative party”. Indeed, those standing by the queue would dance, play their own music or just stand by the fence, screaming their disappointment in the direction of the main stage. Additionally, the citizens of Płoty quickly noticed that the unfortunate non-attendants might prove a goldmine, offering a private campsite right by the fence of the festival. In various online discussions there emerged a suggestion that an alternative Pol’and’Rock be organized in Kostrzyn, the place where it took place over the last few years, though if this initiative succeeded, it left few lasting marks in the community. Last but not least, it should be mentioned that Station Jesus – a festival organized as a Christian or even evangelistic event alternative – also took place this year. Some of the participants would migrate between Station Jesus and the former Station Woodstock, interacting with those hopelessly standing by the latter’s entrance. Their input was rarely as welcome as it was this year.

Clash of official with unofficial: information about how to reach the main entry to the festival with a handmade sign about the unofficial campsite nearby
Some of the unfortunate non-participants, literally hanging by the fence

The people described above are characterized by a strong sense of subjective identification with Pol’and’Rock community. Many of the interviewees stated that they partook in earlier editions, which is what prompted them to travel to the festival site, even without assurance of entering the main festival, though it should be noted that most of them declared that they live in relative proximity to Płoty (for example, in the same voivodship). Similarly, and this time encouraged by the organizers, a sense of community could be found among online participants of the 2021 edition of Pol’and’Rock Festival. In this case, the unique phenomenon of the pandemic could be observed, namely that of the unity of time replacing the unity of space, which usually creates the liminal character of a music event. Of course, this liminality is limited given the circumstances of the event, with participants devoting their time to listening to the festival while also taking part in their everyday activities. This is largely the source of the title of this blog entry. For the organizers, it was crucial to ‘manage’ the liminality of Pol’and’Rock as much as it was possible. Firstly, the Turnerian anti-structure typical of music festivals was much smaller than usual due to the ever-present pandemic restrictions. Secondly, and partially contradicting the former statement, there were visible attempts at making the restrictions of this liminal stage between pandemic and post-pandemic times as unobtrusive as possible. Lastly, despite encouraging partying by the campsite’s entry, it was necessary to limit such non-participation, so that a general sense of the event’s uniqueness was maintained. On the whole, however, the 27th edition of Pol’and’Rock proved to be a truly exceptional experience, not in the least because of people’s willingness to join the event – to partake in this liminality – limited as it might be.

A rainbow above Pol’and’Rock – a good omen for next year?

References

Turner, V. (1982) Celebration. Studies in Festivity and Ritual. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Zespoły, z którymi planujemy spotkanie na Festiwalu. (n.d.). Accessed August 30, 2021, from https://polandrockfestival.pl/kto-zagra

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Going hybrid: Cracow’s festival scene in the time of a pandemic

Karolina Golemo and Marta Kupis 

Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Poland

A year ago, in March 2020, Poland entered the first lockdown, which influenced the cultural sector in general and the music festival scene specifically.  At the time, it was still believed that the critical situation would not last long, leaving festival organisers in a state of uncertainty as to how they should proceed with the events planned for 2020. Cracow a member of UNESCO Creative Cities Network with  its nearly 100 festivals organised annually, many on an international scale, had to face these new circumstances.  The  organisers were forced to cancel or  redefine the form of their events, as well as look for new ways of communicating with  audiences.  The three festivals that we observed (EtnoKraków/Crossroads, Sacrum Profanum, and Unsound) responded to the pandemic circumstances in a different way. 

Following the governmental restrictions, the EtnoKraków/Crossroads festival postponed the date of the 2020 edition a couple of times, waiting until the last moment to decide when, where and how to organise it. Eventually, it was delayed for two months and involved visible limitations due to sanitary reasons,  resulting in a hybrid form: live concerts with sanitary restrictions were combined with radio transmissions of previous editions’ concerts, and online streaming via Facebook and on their webpage. The Unsound Festival’s  first reaction was to cancel the 2020 edition, but shortly later the organisers decided to change its format, to launch a crowdfunding campaign, and to go online with a different programme encompassing less music and more talks. The theme of the 2020 edition was “Intermission”,  referring to a break caused by the pandemic, “a period starkly separating before from after”.  

Unsound Festival online 2020, on Instagram

Following the first governmental announcement about COVID -19 restrictions concerning the festival sector,  the Sacrum Profanum festival  organisers  made a decision about a total change of their festival form, treating it as an occasion for experimentation. They moved the whole event to the virtual space (using a special VOD platform ‘Kraków Play’ created to share cultural content during the pandemic), but with a brand  new cycle of live concerts pre-recorded in various festival locations specifically for the 2020 edition, with artists and sound technicians present on the spot. The “only” missing element was the  physical presence of the public. The duration of the event  was also prolonged from one week to one month, turning it into a “slow festival”, as stated by the organisers. The examples of the above mentioned festivals shows that  there are different  models of a “hybrid festival” where the “hybridity” may concern: the space, transmission channels,  geographic dimension, and content.

Sacrum Profanum Festival 2020, on Krakow Play Platform.

Although  the “hybrid events” are not a completely new phenomenon, it is only now that they become necessary to keep festivals from falling apart during the pandemic. Rather importantly, the majority of respondents to Event Manager Blog’s survey declared that they wanted to maintain the online audience after the pandemic crisis is over. If hybrid events are indeed here to stay, it seems important to study how they are experienced by all participants of the festival community: artists, organisers, and last by not least, the audience.

Hybrid festival spaces may be described as spaces where different types of festival experience can occur simultaneously: live/real and virtual; collective/shared and individual; public and private/intimate. The issue of hybrid spaces as domains of intercultural relations had already been studied before the COVID-19 emergency changed the understanding of participation in culture and cultural exchange. Leszek Korporowicz (2016; 2017) claims that hybrid spaces are areas of constant transgressions and creative potential, especially if they also allow for different cultures to interact. Moreover, this transgressive potential is also linked to the technological characteristics underlying the virtual-/cyber-space, which in turn influence the mental and social states of their users. Most importantly, they are spaces where “physical distances lose their importance in favour of semiotic ‘distances’”. As a result, the very understanding of space – especially in its symbolic and informational aspects – changes, becoming increasingly “contextual, hybrid and multi-dimensional”. Korporowicz  (2016:19) suggests that all of these characteristics allow not only for the broadening of cultural spaces’ borders, but made them very easy to cross: “They are full of “holes” or “gateways,” and, in equal measure, overlays and synergies that shift in the world of global information flow, and consequently of a new configuration of communities defined by their participation in the network society” (Ibid.: 20). Are music festivals, especially those taking place in hybrid spaces, such gateways? Another definition of hybridity can be provided in the context of the mass media. The term “hybrid” refers there to a complex intermedia dynamic between  mainstream  news media  and social media, as well as the complicated  circulations between messages and actors, and the recombination of media on a variety of media platforms. Sumiala et al (2016: 98) describe hybrid media events as “media events whose significance for media professionals, politicians, and non-elites is being reconfigured by the growth of social media”. The hybrid festivals’ formula can also be analysed through the concept of “time-space distanciation” introduced by Anthony Giddens (1991). According to him, the advance in communication technologies caused the stretching of social relations and made the remote interactions a significant feature of everyday life. As a consequence, the interconnectivity and interdependencies have increased, as can be seen from the example of the online festival communities, connecting people from many corners of the world.

The Unsound Festival’s  organisers made a direct reference to hybrid realities by including the theme of hybridity in one of the debates during Unsound Lab, a special workshop for people wishing to start a career in music management. The discussion “Online/offline – hybrid possibilities” focused on the immaterial future of music and the role of streamed music events. They also organised an experiment with the participation of the audience and invited people  to place multiple online-devices  (including those archaic ones) around their apartments and simultaneously listen to the same performance. The idea was to produce  a completely new sonic effect, a  “Corona-style multichannel-audio experience”.

Unsound Festival online 2020, on Instagram

The observation of the 2020 editions of the selected festivals allows us to enumerate the following COVID -19 challenges and opportunities the organizers were and are still dealing with: 

A) Reorganization and new uses of the festival space, including the appearance of cyber spaces, “time-space distanciation”,  and a blurring of private/public sphere(s). On a more theoretical level, it can be said that in hybrid and virtual events, all or part of the role usually fulfilled by space is overtaken by time: rather than by meeting in the same place, any sense of community is created by mass communication at the same time. The example of the Sacrum Profanum organisers showed a fresh attitude to the virtual space: they tried to treat the network as a place of artistic activities, rather than merely the means of reflecting them. The new formula allowed them to showcase concerts in interiors that could not be used in the traditional model. This has given them the impetus for change: in future editions, they plan to reduce the number of listeners in order to give them the opportunity to participate in smaller events taking place in original locations (beyond mass reach), as well as to go to the backstage and see how the event is produced in  real time.

B) New forms of organiser-artist-audience cooperation where the festival experience is turned into a “mediated experience”. The artists and debate participants had no or a limited ability to interact with the audience or gauge their reactions, especially in the case of pre-recorded performances in the Sacrum Profanum festival. Consequently, the organisers had to explore the online mediums’ affordances to deal with this barrier: for Unsound, this meant the occasion to finally fulfil their long term plan of publishing a book of essays and an album of songs recorded for the festival – both of which are available in the traditional (indeed, vinyl!) formats, as well as digital downloads. However, probably the most interesting examples of hybridity in performance came as a direct result of a Coronavirus infection suffered at the time by the festival’s artistic director, Jan Słowiński.  Firstly, he had to coordinate a live event entirely virtually, which may be usual in the preparation stage, but is less common during the festival. Secondly, his wife Joanna, who is also a singer and was isolating with her husband, participated in the performance with the Sokół Orchestra via an online connection . This also meant that the musicians had to coordinate their live playing with her virtual vocals – and it must be stated that they did this flawlessly.

The pandemic crisis had its financial aspect which proved quite painful for the cultural sector, though it must be noted that the festivals we analysed were in a relatively good situation, as they do not rely fully on ticket sales. Still, the usual financing from central and municipal administration was largely cut, leading the organisers to look for alternative sources of money. In Unsound’s case this meant an online crowdfunding action, which turned out to be very successful, showing their festival audience’s strong sense of solidarity with the event. On the other hand, the organisers of  Sacrum Profanum Festival decided to work exclusively with Polish artists to support native performers, as the individual artists were also affected by the pandemic restrictions.

C) New understanding of openness/exclusion. Online events are available theoretically for a limitless public, but in practice participation is restrained by technological skills and resources. Among those who do have them, new patterns of accessibility can be observed: the virtual/hybrid concerts are available for people who would be excluded from the traditional live format (especially people with disabilities and those who can’t afford to travel to festival site). Additionally, there may be increased participation from people who would usually be indecisive on whether they want to go to a given event, as monetary and time costs are much lower in such circumstances (the case of Sacrum Profanum, a festival of experimental and modern classical music). 

D) Rethinking active/passive participation. While the intrusion of the festival into private homes has its disadvantages, it may also pose an opportunity for the audience to take a more active part in the event’s life. The most striking example of this is the case of Unsound being crowdfunded by its fans. While some prosumptive behaviours – in the sense of consuming/experiencing the concert through the audience’s own creations and activities – are possible and indeed frequent in traditional, live concert circumstances, in the hybrid situation they become the only widely available way to engage (or at least feel engaged) with the artists and other viewers. Whether it is a photograph of oneself while watching the event, a comment under the transmission or a handmade painting on the festival theme, the real-time online audience activities become much more important for the maintenance of festival atmosphere. The Sacrum Profanum festival also provided other forms of online  interaction with the public: Cracow’s soundwalks for children, DIY digital workshops on making musical instruments or an interactive composition with alternative variations to be chosen/voted by the audience watching  the event via Play Kraków platform. 

E) New opportunities for (virtual) cultural exchange. The example of the Unsound festival audience showed that its online actions – on Facebook and Discord – were aimed at maintaining a sense of  community.  Live commentators are eager to share where they come from and non-Polish speakers are usually welcomed by local participants, often offering help in “moving around” the virtual stages. It can be seen as a realisation of Manuel Castells  (2010) network society, with the festival itself serving as the central “node” of communication, surrounded by many multidirectional exchanges between the participants from different cultures.

Probably the most profound change that emerges in the festival sphere due to the emergence of hybrid festivals is a change of the very meaning of “liveness”. A festival can be a “live” event even in a virtual space, where the interactions within the festival community and real-time reactions of the public occur through digital channels. 

As Paweł Potoroczyn – an EFA member and culture manager – states, “festivals are ideas in work, and not brands”. The emergency situation and atypical conditions often make space for new (courageous) ideas, experiments,  and “extravagance”, as was manifested during the restrictions during the time of the pandemic. The current circumstances remind us that the concept of ‘liminality’ is inscribed into the phenomenon of (music) festivals, and especially to festival communities. The new festival formats that appeared as a consequence of Covid -19 are unquestionably a manifestation of organisational creativity, even though for some researchers and festival sector specialists, like Robert Piaskowski, nothing can replace the real, material (physical) event and that “emotion that spreads in the crowd and not only in the network”.  

References 

Castells, M. (2010) Społeczeństwo sieci (M. Marody (trans.); 2nd ed.), Warszawa. 

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press. 

Korporowicz, L. (2017). Extended cultures : towards a discursive theory of hybrid space. In A. Duszak, A. Jabłoński, & A. Leńko-Szymańska (Eds.) East-Asian and Central-European encounters in discourse analysis and translation, Instytut Lingwistyki Stosowanej, WLS UW, pp. 13-31.

Korporowicz, L. (2016)  ‘Intercultural Space’,  Politeja 5 (44): 17-33.

Solaris, J. (2020) The Future of Events Is Definitely Hybrid: What Will They Why Hybrid Events Are Here to Stay. https://www.eventmanagerblog.com/future-is-hybrid-events

Sumiala, J., Tikka, M., Huhtamäki, J., & Valaskavi, K. (2016) ‘#JeSuisCharlie: Towards a Multi-Method Study of Hybrid Media Events’, Media and Communication, 4 (4): 97-108.