Festival co-creation and transformation: The case of Tribal Gathering in Panama

The last decade evidences a proliferation of academic and multimedia sources that identify and describe ‘transformational festivals’; a term denoting the idea an informed and agential community is capable of bringing about change, where the festival can serve as a space for change. Prior literature suggests that the formation of transformational festivals is associated with event co-creation, indicating how said events are enacted by varied participants, blurring the boundary between actor and audience and producer and consumer. Yet, the relationship between the transformational potential and co-creative enactment of festivals remains an underexplored area of research. To explore this relation, theoretically, I apply ‘ritualization’ as a conceptual lens focusing on how activities of event co-creation produce a contrast between ordinary life and the extraordinary occasion from which the event assembles its transformative capacity. Empirically, this chapter draws upon an ethnography of Tribal Gathering in Panama from 28 February to 16 March 2020; an 18-day event enabled by the creative activities of “tribes” or representatives of indigenous communities, organizers, workers, volunteers, and attendees as a heterogenous community. In the findings I describe how Tribal Gathering was created by these diverse participants and discuss its transformational capacity via four main cultural strategies; namely (1) temporal stretching and spatial removal, (2) tribal aestheticization, (3) deliberate co-creation and (4) intentional manifestation. The main contribution of this chapter is the insight it provides into how activities of event co-creation optimize a transitional environment, enabling festal participants to depart from, challenge, or transform the status quo.