Festivals, landscapes, and aesthetic engagement: A phenomenological approach to four Norwegian festivals

The article examines the relationship between festivals, landscapes, and aesthetics. Since the 1960s there has been considerable growth in the numbers and types of festivals in the Western world, and in the creative use of landscape and environment as contexts and frames for many of these festivals. The article addresses two central questions: What are the characteristics of the phenomenon of festivals? In what ways do festivals in a Norwegian context relate to the landscape that both surrounds them and is part of their constitution? Using a theatrical metaphor, festivals and landscape can be perceived as instant cultural and aesthetic encounters in a performance space. The authors find that festivals as cultural events are characterized by social, aesthetic, and symbolic value, as well as cohesion, joy, openness, expressive, play, and diversity, and that experience is not exclusively individual but rather rooted in social and material interaction with other people and the environment. The approach is based on body-oriented, phenomenological, multisensous (synaesthetic) perspectives on festivals and landscapes. The article provides examples from four festivals in Norway.