Musikfestivals als "zyklische Orte": Fairport's Cropredy Convention

The last ten years has seen a significant expansion of the British music festival scene, with many hundreds of events now held every year. Of these, more than a quarter are held on rural greenfield sites which offer an escape from urban life and stresses, and the ephemeral appropriation of space and nature. A number of existing theoretical approaches to understanding the material and symbolic construction and reconstruction of such festivals are examined and critiqued in this chapter. These include Mikhail Bakhtin?s notion of the carnivalesque and Victor Turner?s conception of the liminal and liminoid. The author then draws on Rob Shields? theory of social spatialization to propose the concept of ?cyclic places? which are characterised by a sense of uniqueness and structured through processes of continuity and change. Case study material will be drawn from a study of Fairport?s Cropredy Convention: a mid-scale festival in rural Oxfordshire run by the English folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention. NOTE: this book chapter is published in German translation