In the weeks since my trip to First Light Festival, a twenty-four hour community arts festival hosted on the beach in Lowestoft, the UK’s most easterly town, I have been trying to make sense of this euphoria. In many ways, the festival had been a disappointment. It had begun with a parade of children from four local schools who took over the promenade, dancing and marching from Claremont Pier to the festival site on South Beach. The main stage (the ‘Sunlight Stage’) was opened with a performance of ‘The Light Returns’, a song commissioned to mark the return of summer but also the return of the festival after two years of Covid cancellations. The lead singer asked those gathered on the beach to dance and sing along with the chorus and the collective joy was palpable: I (and many others) wholeheartedly embraced festival director Genevieve Christie’s invitation to ‘come together at First Light’ right from the start. As textbook Falassian rites of separation from normal life, these communal opening moments seemed to promise a weekend of exemplary festivity. However, other rites and rituals were less successful. Take, for example, the burning of the ‘Pakefield Man’, a straw-filled iron sculpture inspired by evidence of early human life found only a short walk down the coastline. This ritual was intended as a moment at which festivalgoers would come together from stages across the site for a moment of community at midnight. After a lapse in security, however, the Pakefield Man was set alight by a group of inebriated youngsters half an hour before the carefully planned symbolic moment should have taken place. 

Things went swiftly downhill from there: by midnight, a storm had rolled in and the festival’s organisers–who had promised a ‘non-stop’ programme ‘to celebrate one full cycle of the sun in Britain’s most easterly town’–were forced to cancel their overnight bookings for health and safety reasons. By this point, collective joy was hard to find. There was no dancing ‘until dawn under the midsummer sky’, though sleep-deprived campers, early arrivals and Lowestoft locals gathered at the water’s edge from 3.30am the next day, hopeful that the ‘unique sunrise programme of music and performance’ that had been planned to celebrate sunrise might still go ahead. Unbeknownst to us, the organisers had announced a cancellation of all pre-7.30am events on Facebook. So there we stood: a group of cold, damp people huddled on the shoreline, looking out across the sea as a dark grey sky became less dark by degrees but stayed resolutely grey. I wondered if there might be a moment of spontaneous festive community, if perhaps someone might sing a song or perform a poem, but nothing much happened. Sleepy, glitter-covered ravers stared deep into coffee cups while litter-picking volunteers scoured the sand for cans and plastic packaging - the festival’s flotsam and jetsam. People chatted quietly about what they had seen the previous day, shared storm stories, and gossiped about a drunken brawl among teenagers that was rumoured to have taken place after the festival site was evacuated. Overtired and underwhelmed, I went back to my tent. 

These may not seem like conditions that would foster feelings of festive euphoria but by First Light’s ‘First Kite Fly-along Finale’, just a few hours after that overdue nap in a rain-soaked tent, euphoric was exactly how I felt. Despite all of the festival’s flaws I had been fully immersed in the First Light experience. These ‘flaws’ might even have contributed to my immersion. After all, nothing bonds strangers together like standing in the queue for the Portaloos in the early hours of the morning and laughing over recollections of Gabby Killick’s ‘Masturbation in Isolation’, an Eminem parody rap about socially-distanced cybersex which was one of the last things to be performed on the First Word stage before rain stopped play. To understand this (the euphoria, not the rap – you had to be there to understand that), I delved into the festival literature and discovered Vern Biaett’s work on ‘organic festivity’.

Biaett (2015) traces the origins of ‘organic festivity’ to the ‘primitive festivity’ of our ancestors, which was ‘unrefined’ and ‘spontaneous’. I am not as confident as Biaett that elements of the modern festival experience can be understood as similar, in some primal way, to early hunter-gatherers’ ‘festive experience of transcendence and feelings of ecstasy’. I do, however, share his interest in ‘moments of special delight, bliss, ecstasy, thrill, or pleasure that one experiences’ in festival contexts. While conducting research as a participant-observer at community festivals Biaett saw these feelings manifest as ‘unplanned, unprompted, impulsive shouts, crazy facial expressions, high-fived hand slaps, little dances, or group hugs’. My own feelings were not as outwardly visible but they were similarly thrilling. This is evident in my account of the final moments of the festival, during which I was an ‘active and engaged attendee’ (as opposed to a ‘passive’ spectator): a festivalgoer whose ‘senses were stimulated and [whose] emotions [were] aroused’ (Biaett, 2019). 

Biaett’s model focuses solely on positive festival experiences and it is important to note that ‘impulsive’ festive behaviour (like the fight at First Light) can also be dangerous. My own experiences of ‘organic festivity’, however, were positive, and I encountered many ‘moments of special delight’ in the First Word Tent. While some poets read from collections, only pausing for applause, most invited ‘collaborative creative activity’ (Biaett, 2019): sets were conversational, inclusive, laugh-out-loud funny and furiously political - sometimes all at once. I learnt about the climate crisis courtesy of Francesca Beard’s ‘Geology Rocks’ and heard my first univocal poem (Jemima Foxtrot’s ‘Tess’ Ten Men’). I got goosebumps as I listened to Mike Garry perform ‘Spring Crossing’, a poem about refugees making perilous journeys which felt particularly poignant when performed next to Lowestoft’s ‘deep’, ‘cold’ sea. Garry’s set included the first of many deeply moving moments I would experience that weekend. There was light relief from Rob Auton, who performed a poem about small talk that resulted in a truly beautiful unscripted festival moment (I doubt I will ever see a tent full of people erupt in applause as a Tic-Tac is passes through the hole of a Polo mint again). Then came more deep feeling: I cried during Piers Harrison-Reid’s set as the Norfolk-based poet and nurse used his words to carve out a space for collective grief, gently coaxing out the trauma of the pandemic that we have all been so careful to repress. I felt rage as Elvis McGonagall, Salena Godden and Kate Fox delivered angry, rabble-rousing performances about the failings of those in power. But there was hope to be found amongst the fury, too. ‘Pessimism is for lightweights’, Godden reminded us. 

Luke Wright’s programme of poetry was heart-wrenching and hopeful. It would have been moving in any context. But, as Biaett (2015) notes, ‘purely organic festivity is not something that can be programmed’: it bubbles up around programmed elements, between the lines of poems, and inside festivalgoers. It was the combination of the poetry and the joy of being part of a festival crowd after Covid and the sleep deprivation and the spectacular weather and countless other factors that culminated in the euphoric, organic feeling that I felt as First Light drew to a close. Our challenge as festival researchers is to be attuned to those special moments, to feel the ebbs and flows of the festival experience, and to remain open to the possibility of radical transformation.