ABSTRACT
Drawing upon a case study from the Irish music festival context, this chapter examines how an independent for-profit music festival, Body & Soul, pivoted from an in-person and immersive event to a commissioning body for artistic outputs during the global pandemic. The government-sponsored, eight-minute multi-media film is read as an attempted sublimation of the ethos of the Body & Soul’s festive team, and in particular its director Avril Stanley, in terms of the ritual function of festivals. The Éiru’s Threshold commission provided a moment out of time, as an immersive and liminal online experience, acting as both a conduit for a grieving nation and for an organisation in the midst of navigating a more sustainable festival model in the face of neoliberal economic pressures. The chapter problematises the notion of what counts as sustainable and explores the tension between wanting to serve a community and needing to be a profitable business. Drawing on literature from music, sociology, event studies, and virtual ethnography, the impact of the pandemic on the music festival circuit is viewed as having a potentially transformative impact. The degree to which this particular case study offers a model for future festivals of this kind, post-pandemic, is explored.
