This chapter explores the development of youth music media and music festivals in Australia, and the synergies between them. This includes the national expansion in the 1990s of public youth radio station Triple J, and its ABC television counterparts rage and Recovery, in parallel with a new wave of music festivals like the Big Day Out, Homebake and Livid. This infrastructure and these events were central to a period of transition for Australian popular music. Local alternative scenes developed into a translocal industrial sub-sector, marketing a distinct national identity and incorporating urban and regional youth audiences. Cultural institutions and practices established during this time, such as the modern music festival and the celebration of ‘homegrown’ Australian artists, continue to be influential. This chapter draws on secondary texts and scholarly literature to map and connect these developments, which are analysed using scene theory.

The Introduction begins with a vignette illustrating the productive tension between a festival’s stated goals and the cultural work performed by its constituent parts. It introduces the book's main problematic: the ways and degrees to which international theatre and multi-arts festivals stage, represent, exchange, market, and negotiate cultural difference, broadly understood to include ethnic, national, Indigenous, queer, disability, and other cultures. It proceeds to outline the book’s major definitional fields (festivals and interculturalism) and scholarly debates around the key characteristics of festivals (their liminality, transformational qualities, and cosmopolitan aspirations). It then outlines the contexts (festivalization, eventification, creative city theory, globalized neoliberalism) within which festivals operate, the scope, methods, and theoretical frames within which the book operates, and the chapter breakdown and festival taxonomy that gives the book its shape.

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.

This chapter introduces the proliferation of festivals and ‘festivalization’ internationally in the twenty-first century, offers definitions and exclusions, and outlines a typology of theatre and performance festivals that now exist globally (elite festivals, alternative and fringe festivals, ‘second-wave’ festivals, and festivals that focus on a single culture or region). It briefly summarizes the book’s chapters on theorizing festivals, research methodology, festival cities, Indigenous festivals, European festivals, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Under the Radar, Australian festivals, Arab festivals, the Kampala International Theatre Festival, the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, Asian Festivals, francophone festivals, festivals in Latin America, and the RUTAS festival.