Towards an elsewhere space : potentialities and performance technologies in Latinx festivals

Latinx festivals are a form of anti-essentialist cultural production. The dissertation centers on Latinx festivals in the United States, between 2010-2022, focusing particularly on festivalization, technology, experimentalism and Latinidad. This study seeks to understand the motivations and experiences of festival producers and curators in producing Latinx transmedia festivals, as well as how performers use various non-standard technologies in their performances to produce new expressions. Data was collected through ethnography, participant observation, and discourse analysis of social media and websites. Interviews included festival organizers, artists, and other collaborators. The study also draws on applied work in festival production. Motivations for Latinx festival production include providing a platform for experimental Latinx arts, as well as increasing professional opportunities for experimental Latinx artists, including composers, multimedia artist, musicians, and dancers. Additionally, festival producers are concerned with making experimental work more accessible to Latinx communities and expanding representations of Latinidad in the arts. Transmedia festival programming allows festival producers to achieve some of these goals, offering a platform for artists working in the interstices of various mediums and existing in-between different cultures. Meanwhile, artists performing in these spaces use customized controllers and objects like robots and automata to express culturally-specific histories, narratives, and desires for the future. The case studies in this dissertation are oriented towards potentiality and futurity, in addition to a notion of shared cultural heritage. These practices center the present condition of being Latinx and serve as sites for co-producing culture, as opposed to celebrating heritage. These findings indicate a need for deterritorialized, pan-Latino, anti-essentialist frameworks in Latin music scholarship, and further research on Latino/x festivals and other emergent forms of cultural production amongst various Latinx groups. Additionally, this study calls for further inquiries into the uses of non-standard technologies in performance practices through an intersectional lens, and a consideration the use of items such as food, plants, and religious paraphernalia as part of customized MIDI controllers or musical automata.