The Féile Journey at 30: Translating Culture through Community Festivals

Féile an Phobail, the West Belfast Festival, will celebrate its 30-year anniversary in 2018. Emerging out of a context of 'demonisation', this week-long, annual event has sought, from its inception in 1988, to counter perceptions of West Belfast as a 'terrorist community'; but from these beginnings, it has grown to become one of the most successful community festivals in Western Europe and the largest community arts festival on the island of Ireland. Yet its impact is only now being examined from a critical and theoretical perspective, and the vast quantity of artefacts generated over the last three decades in terms of festival programmes, recordings, letters and other communications, posters and other visual material such as personal photographs, had not been systematically archived until our project began. Féile's rich history had been scattered, uncatalogued, in attics, garages and offices of those who have been key protagonists in the festival at different moments in its history. As such, a longitudinal, research-based evaluation of the legacy and impact of the festival - not least in terms of its original aim to translate the culture of west Belfast into a different narrative - is only now possible, and little critical attention has been paid to the role of this festival in N. Ireland's emergence from conflict in the ongoing Peace Process. The original Translating Cultures award from which the present project emerges was the first to begin the process of collecting and evaluating that primary data. Our feilebelfasthistory.com website currently includes just over 3000 artefacts with several thousand still awaiting digitisation. The work to expand, and enhance the functionality of the digital archive will continue with funding provided by Queen's University's Impact Fund, but the present project is focused on the new and unforeseen impact and engagement opportunities the archive and associated research has inspired. Neither the project team nor key community partners anticipated the volume or richness of the material provided to researchers in the form of both physical artefacts and reflections shared in stakeholder interviews. Our follow-on project is thus focused on developing the impact potential of this material in terms of: (a) communicating the legacy of the festival to a wider audience and, crucially, shaping its future; (b) promoting broader cross-community understanding via a documentary film, a musical, an exhibition and a published memoir; and (c) sharing both the example of Féile's growth and the potential for/outcomes of collaboration with researchers as a case study for other community festivals or organisations seeking to reflect on their own trajectories and/or to collect and evaluate their own narrative.

For Féile, our project is recognised as a crucial means of facilitating often robust discussion of the challenge of shaping its next 30 years: Bill Rolston, academic specialist on political murals and member of the Féile Discussion & Debate committee, questions, in an interview with us, where the 'oppositional challenge in Féile is now', asserting that the key test for Féile going forwards is 'to find the space that is progressive and resistant and oppositionalist in whatever ways'. Likewise, Aidan McAteer, and another interviewee, notes how the festival has become more inclusive than it was in its early years 'because it was providing a voice for a community that was censored, and brutalised, and imprisoned, and constantly under attack, and there's less need [now] for that singular political focus'. As such, Féile 'certainly needs to stand on its own integrity and not compromise its core values and its core politics in order to become part of the mainstream. It needs to change the mainstream rather than the mainstream changing it... I'm not saying an uncompromising position, but a principled position. Otherwise, we'll end up with whoever the winner of the X-Factor is playing next year!'

This project will impact significantly both on one of the most successful community festivals in Ireland, Féile an Phobail, and on the broader West Belfast community, which has the second highest rate of child poverty of any UK parliamentary constituency. It will do so by demonstrating, detailing and thinking critically about the relationship between translating cultures, connecting communities, festivalisation and arts practice in contexts of acute disadvantage and demonisation. It will help the community consider how its engagement with arts practice has produced social and economic empowerment, cultural exchange and conflict resolution in a context of acute political violence. It will also help policy makers, arts practitioners and advocates, and community activists across Britain and Ireland think about the value of the arts and festivalisation, as part of a timely engagement with a compelling case study which will itself be provoking intensified debate and reflection in its thirtieth anniversary year. Further, the project will have a significant impact on the Irish-language community in Belfast - a community embattled, in recent times, by the impact of sectarianism and funding cuts (see anon., 'The role of the Irish language in Northern Ireland's deadlock', The Economist, 12 April 2017), through a significant increase in the Irish-language elements of the project and engagement activities with Irish-language enthusiasts linked with Féile. In the context of the recent Warwick Commission report (Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth: The 2015 Report by the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value), and what it identified in terms of ongoing exclusion of working-class and BME communities from enjoyment of and participation in the arts, our extended project will also impact on policy by probing further and disseminating widely the phenomenally trend-bucking role Féile has played in empowering and enriching one of the most systematically socially excluded and consistently demonised communities on these islands.

Details of the impacts we seek to have via the project, the beneficiaries of those impacts, and how we will ensure that those benefits can be attained are set out in detail in the Case for Support. These cut across the range of possible impacts identified by the AHRC, including: enhancing the research capacity, knowledge and skills of public, private and third sector organisations; potentially attracting R&D investment; improving health and wellbeing by enhancing cultural enrichment and quality of life; and, crucially, improving social cohesion for marginalised communities and communities in situations of conflict or post-conflict tensions.