ABSTRACT
The 2020 cancellation of the Danish Roskilde Festival, the largest music festival in Northern Europe, presented a unique opportunity to explore the social, cultural, and symbolic meaning of festivals. This chapter draws on a survey distributed in the summer of 2020 and a single-case study of a self-organised festival in 2021 based on ethnographic observation and focus group interviews. It explores the emotional and social reactions to the cancellation through Collins’ (2004) theory of interaction rituals and Boyns and Luery’s (2015) extension of this framework. Out of the 807 survey respondents, 31% planned to organise replacement festivals or engage in other festival-related activities in the period that the festival was supposed to take place. Likewise, the two focus group interviews revealed participants drew upon the established Roskilde Festival rituals to create social order and internal solidarity in their camp community. Both survey respondents and focus groups make use of, in Collins’ terms, high emotional energy (EE) creating activities and reinforcing traditions to establish resonance in the face of disruption. In making up for the unfulfilment of EE due to the cancellation, respondents create their own ‘time out of time’, ensuring continuity of festival solidarities.
