This chapter traces the history of European festivals from Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth (with its professed inspiration in the Festival of Dionysus in fifth-century Athens) through the Salzburg Festival, the Festival d’Avignon, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Festival of Athens and Epidaurus, to the Théâtre des Nations and its successor, Germany’s Theatre der Welt. Examining festival repertoires, it traces an evolution of the representation of difference and the relationship between the international repertoire and the local, settling finally on the 2017 Hamburg edition of Theater der Welt and asking: can an international theatre festival still be a place and a site for community-building and transformation? Examining the supposed ‘global aesthetics’ in evidence in Hamburg’s rigorous deployment of the local, it argues that the political and the aesthetic at festivals necessarily become inextricably entangled.

This chapter discusses the role of city festivals in shaping and re-imagining urban space. There has been increased interest in festivals among decision-makers and marketers as vehicles for cultural profiling, regeneration, and social inclusion. The chapter views space as inseparable from economic and social structures and practices which govern urban life. It draws attention to the political aspect of city festivals as being mobilized for economic, social, and cultural purposes. It draws on Lefebvre’s and Massey’s conceptualizations of space as socially produced to discuss examples of theatre festivals based in Northern Europe. It shows how, more than simply putting on a show, these festivals aim to infuse the cityscape with new meanings. In doing so, the festivals become implied in (re)configurations of social patterns of representation and marginalization, for example regarding how they open or close urban space to different audiences. The chapter argues that a spatial perspective provides a critical means for examining how festivals organize bodies, social hierarchies, and relations of inclusion and exclusion in the city.