Dancing through Transformational Music Festivals: Playing with Leisure and Art

• Author / Creator

  Mohr, Kelci L

• This exploratory work investigates the “transformational festival,” a contemporary form of celebratory leisure that revolves around music, the arts, community, and co-creativity. By integrating interpretative phenomenological analysis with methods from arts-based research, critical ethnography, and storytelling, I seek to understand how life-changing processes may be enabled or supported through the construction of three particular festival timespaces: Shambhala, Astral Harvest, and Intention Alberta. The research is focused on a group of festival goers who consider these kinds of events important for their leisure lives and their greater (trans)personal development. This work queries how transformational festivals are perceived, experienced, and why they might be meaningful for this group. It affirms that people are seeking community, ecstatic rituals, and spiritual elements within festivals, and suggests the importance of adding transpersonal considerations to current leisure discourses that focus on individual social-psychological interactions. The interdisciplinary and creative nature of the project challenges dominant metanarratives by adding alternative accounts of how people are enriching their lives through leisure experiences on the margins of awareness in academia and normative society.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Celebration
  • Interpretative phenomenological analysis
  • Astral Harvest
  • Arts-based research (ABR)
  • Lefebvre
  • Rhythm
  • Spirituality
  • Peak experience
  • Dance
  • RhizomEthnography
  • Ethnography
  • Bricolage
  • Cultural topology
  • Electronic
  • Community
  • Ekstasis or ecstasy
  • Art
  • Interlistening
  • Carnival
  • Transpersonal
  • Co-creative
  • Shambhala
  • Transformation
  • Alternative
  • Self
  • Festival
  • Leisure
  • Intention Alberta
  • Music

• Graduation date

  Fall 2016

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R33J39C9F

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.