by Crimethinc. Workers' Collective
Available in 284 free installments
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Who will be invited to your festival? Once again, there are goals that a homogenous group can accomplish together that would be impossible in more mixed company, but there's also a lot to be said for bridging divides and nurturing symbiotic relationships between communities. Consider ways to draw upon different circles, soliciting the participation of individuals and groups that will engage them.
Where, when, and how will you hold your festival? It is often difficult to get people to come to places they've never been, or to participate in unfamiliar activities; think about how to take advantage of routines or interests that are already established, or integrate your event into existing social forms. As for timing and location, it can be beneficial to pick a space that receives a lot of traffic, so passersby can witness or join in your events. To maximize this potential, pick an area that is frequented by demographics that are likely to be interested; for example, a Reclaim the Streets (pg. 421) action might draw more spontaneous participation in an arts-oriented neighborhood than it would in an Festivals industrial area. Depending on the scale of your event and the local context, it may be 242 necessary to seek a permit from the local administration; when doing so, don't mis-
represent your project completely, but don't tell them anything they won't understand or don't need to know. Serious police attention and repression can interfere witJi your project, or be turned to your advantage, depending on your strategy; if you're hoping to avoid it, it might be wise not to announce it in forums, such as direct action websites, that they already associate v^dth trouble.
How will you promote your festival.^ Posters, stickers, press releases, word of mouth, the internet, announcements on college radio stations: all are fair game, unless your festival must be a secret to succeed. Certain kinds of press attention may be inconvenient for any kind of event; for these, contact the media yourself, being as boring and ttnre-markable as possible, so as to deter them in advance (see Mainstream Media, pg. 358). As for whether to associate festivals vdth political perspectives, be judicious: sometimes this can increase interest, sometimes it can distract or alienate. Don't be afraid to be out of the closet about where you're coming from, just make sure that doesn't limit who else feels comfortable participating.
We decided to take advantage of our relationship with the local independent movie theater to hold a radical film festival. Instead of screening little-knovra. independent movies of a radical bent, we would try the opposite tack: we would screen mainstream movies with subversive implications, in the most radicalizing atmosphere we could create. We hoped this would bring out people who would never attend an obscure subcultural event yet shared our interest in thinking and living differently, and give them the opportunity to get connected to others with the same desires. To make this work, we solicited help from everyone we knew, inviting people to offer workshops to share their skills or set up literature tables on behalf of their infoshops and organizations.
We covered the streets of our town with hundreds of fliers and a few dozen six-foot posters over the weeks leading up to the event, promoting it as a "heArt and Film Festi-
Account
Festivals 243
You can make messenger bags,
shoes, neckties, and ball gowns
by ironing a few layers of plastic
grocery bags together: set the iron
on "cotton," sandwich the plastic
between paper grocery bags so it
won't stick, and be quick. After you've
made a few sheets of different colors,
cut out images or text and iron them
onto a background of plastic bags;
presto, plastic patch designs.
You can sew with dental floss.
Festivals 244
val": four days of movies, skillshares, and other activities. To put our money where our rhetoric was, we declared that on the main day of the festival, everything would be free. This was a gamble?our efforts to talk the theater into giving us cheap rates had only been partially successful, and we had failed to persuade anyone to sponsor the event, so it was optimistic to think we could afford to rent the place and all the film reels with the proceeds of just a few movie showdngs. All the same, we posted a schedule on the internet and sent out a press release, which got us coverage from the local paper.
