The Economic Communities of Edinburgh’s August Festivals: An Exclusive ‘Global Sense of Place’ and an Inclusive ‘Local Sense of Space’

This essay proposes to use a cultural materialist analysis and draws upon Doreen Massey’s writings (1991, 1994, 2007, 2012) on place, community and the ‘sense of place’ in order to explore the imagined theatrical communities of Edinburgh’s August Festivals (EAFs). EAFs is used as an umbrella term for the four festivals that take place during that time: the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Free Festival and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Being an academic and theatre maker, this essay is informed by my own empirical experience as a theatre maker performing at the EAFs in 2013. During this experience, I negotiated my belonging and otherness in relation to theatrical communities that were defined not by geography or social relations but by the economy of the EAFs.

As an artist, I offered my otherness for consumption and contributed to Edinburgh’s local economy both directly and indirectly. From my position as an entrepreneur and consumer of both culture at the EAFs and also products and services during my everyday interactions, I not only contributed to the local economy but I also economically contributed to the EAFs and the culture of the city. Due to my consumption in Edinburgh, I was granted temporal locality. From a global perspective, my solo show offered an identity representation of a participant with a lower symbolic value and capital. In a certain form it served universal cosmopolitan values of intercultural sharing but it also invited EAFs’ hybrid economic communities to reflect on the ways neoliberal power geometries are established and economic interactions commodify Fringe art.