“Stay in Synch!”: Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 131–151 ISSN 1947-5403 ©2013 Dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net DOI 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.07 “Stay in Synch!”: Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival Vassiliki Lalioti National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece) Abstract Synch is an electronic music festival that takes place in Athens every summer and brings together people of various cultural origins and musical and aesthetic interests. As a total performance event, Synch becomes a site of complexity, polyvocality and hybridity; a site which allows participants to create and express cosmopolitan attitudes of openness for others, people, ideas and experiences. Adopting an anthropological/ ethnographic perspective, this paper moves beyond distinctions between elite vs. ordinary and consumer vs. ethical cosmopolitanism, and investigates Synch as a site where local and trans-local aspects of life and a set of socio-cultural meanings in Greece today are being negotiated. Keywords: festival; performance; cosmopolitanism; ethnography; Greece Vassiliki Lalioti is Lecturer in Anthropolog y of Performance at the Faculty of Music Stud- ies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has conducted ethnographic research in various areas of Greece, she is the co-author of the book “...because it’s in our blood”. From Ancient Drama to Flamenco: Bringing Anthropolog y Back to the Field of Experience (in Greek) and her papers have been published in various Greek and international journals. Her research interests are in the fields of performing arts (theatre, music), anthropolog y of the body, anthropolog y of technolog y. Email Vassiliki at . Feature Article Dancecult 5(2)132 Introduction Synch, is an urban, mixed genre international festival with special focus on music and contemporary technologies. It was first held in June 2004 in Lavrio, a city 40 km south-east of Athens, but since 2006 it takes place in Athens every summer. Music is the core of Synch: from electro, dance, house, techno, ambient and electronica to experimental, post rock, noise, electro latin and hip hop. Hundreds of established and rising young artists from Greece and many other, European and non-European, countries have “vibrated its spaces with contemporary music” (Elissavet, audience member).1 Apart from music, Synch is also about moving image and new media. According to many local and international audience members and journalists, it has become the biggest music, art and technolog y festival in Greece and one of the most significant in Europe. Festivals, public celebrations, spectacles and public events in general have always been some of anthropologists’ favorite subjects of study because they are considered to be celebrations of community, values, identities, ideologies and continuity, either as expressions of a collective consciousness (Durkheim 1976) or as dynamic, dialogic and polyphonic ritual performances (Turner 1982). Traditionally festivals have been approached as “time out of time” (Falassi 1987), that is, as having clearly defined boundaries from the world outside, placing emphasis on closed spaces, fixed times and indigenous social actors. In the contemporary globalized world, however, flows of people, information and capital have led to situations of increased individual mobility, demographic change and new work and life rhythms. Thus, there is a growing literature that seeks to position festivals in a context that is fluid and open to different scopes of transnational society and cultural vectors (Picard and Robinson 2006). Within this context, the emphasis is placed on their significance as specific kinds of experience and the multiplicity of—usually contradictory—meanings that are at once personal, social, cultural, political and economic (Getz 2010: 7). In this light, I intend to investigate Synch as a site of complexity, polyvocality and hybridity; as a performance event that allows participants to create and experience cosmopolitan attitudes of openness towards others, people, ideas and values. To achieve this, I explore the relationship of the festival with the city of Athens and focus on the ways in which performers and audience members participate and communicate with each other in the festival spaces. The ethnographic material used in this paper was collected during fieldwork I conducted in Athens. Fieldwork included participant observation during the Synch Festival of 2009 and 2010, as well as informal talks with members of the audience and unstructured interviews with musicians and organizers. Published material from Internet sources and artists” interviews in musical magazines were also utilized in order to shed light on the meanings those involved attribute to their experiences. The scarce anthropological/ethnographic literature on electronic dance music (EDM) festivals mainly investigates the ways in which liminality generates potential transformative experiences for participants. Jaimangal-Jones, Pritchard and Morgan (2010), for example, discuss the significance of journey and liminality for participants attending large festival- Lalioti | Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival 133 type dance music events and contend that travel to dance events is socially constructed by participants both as a rite of passage and as a pilgrimage or source of spiritual fulfillment. With reference to Portugal’s Boom Festival, St John (2009) also explores the religio-spiritual characteristics of psytrance music culture. My aim, however, in this paper is to contribute, on the one hand, to the study of electronic music, a current cultural phenomenon that has been ignored by Greek anthropolog y,2 and, on the other hand, to a wider academic discussion on Greek music. Studies of Greek music have mainly focused either on folk/traditional genres (Herzfeld 1982; Kallimopoulou 2009), or on rebetiko (Tragaki 2007), but recently there is a growing interest in popular music genres and cultures, like éntehno (Papanikolaou 2007), laikó, (Dawe 2003) and jazz (Tsioulakis 2011), as well as in various artists, like Anna Vissi (Polychronakis 2007), which, placed in their social and cultural context, shed light on local and trans-local aspects of life and on a set of socio-cultural meanings in Greece today. Tracing Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism is one of the most recently debated topics in social theory. There is a growing interest in cosmopolitanism both on the level of politics and political discourse, and in the fields of social sciences and humanities, especially in political science, comparative literature, philosophy and anthropolog y. Although not all theories on cosmopolitanism could be covered in this paper, it could, however, be argued that some scholars have used it as a prescriptive vision of global democracy and world citizenship, some as a theoretical space for describing hybrid cultural identities, while others as a way for defining social processes and individual behaviors expressing a capacity to accept cultural difference.3 Traditionally, the term mainly referred to social elites who had the privilege to travel, come to contact with and adopt ways of life, attitudes and values beyond their national cultures. Thus, designations applied to the term such as “elite”, “liberal”, or “artificial” essentially criticized cosmopolitanism as an elitist social representation or as an impossible project that aimed to reconcile universal values with a diversity of culturally and historically constructed subject positions. However, there is a current tendency to move beyond both the Western, elitist aura of the old cosmopolitan model, and beyond old models of the multi-, inter- and cross-cultural in a number of ways. One could cite Rabinow’s (1986) “critical cosmopolitanism”, which acknowledges that transnational experiences are particular rather than universal, and forced as well as voluntary, Clifford’s (1992) “discrepant cosmopolitanism”, which refers to existing practical stances as opposed to theoretical ideals, Cohen’s (1992) “rooted cosmopolitanism” grounded in the sociocultural specificities of the nation state, or Werbner’s (1999) “working-class cosmopolitanism”, which focuses on demotic and popular experiences of transnationalism. According to Gilbert and Lo, all of them could be seen as efforts “to remake cosmopolitanism into a more wordly and less elitist concept, an endeavor that includes recuperating “cosmopolitans from below”—defined along class and racial lines and encompassing refugees, migrants and itinerant workers” (2007: 5). Dancecult 5(2)134 Cosmopolitanism also refers to various critiques of globalization that, either as polarities or as complimentary and articulated terms, made the localist/globalist framework of analysis central. During the last decade, scholars problematized the understanding of globalization as flows and –scapes,4 since it could not take into account the uniqueness and unevenness of the described phenomena (Inda and Rosaldo 2008: 6). Recent anthropological work has thus shown that globalization should be seen as a set of actions and agencies, which often exist in conflict and opposition. From this point of view, Turino (2003: 61-3) proposes cosmopolitanism as a useful analytical tool, further suggesting “cosmopolitan formations” that have their own habits and resources for living and are themselves culturally grounded. More specifically, in order to understand trans-state cultural and musical processes we should ground the analysis in specific people’s lives and experiences. Stokes (2007), too, proposes to understand cosmopolitanism as the product of certain kinds of intentionality and agency, which we might appropriately understand politically and culturally. We should not, however, forget the elements of play and pleasure in the global circulation of musical practice and think of music as a process of making “worlds” rather than a passive reaction to global “systems”. Despite the tensions it has reflected and the variety of adjectives that have been attributed to it, cosmopolitanism is closely related to notions of empathy and respect for other cultures and values, efforts to bridge cultural differences through dialogue and aesthetic enjoyment, as well as to complex ways to juggle particular and transcend loyalties (Werbner 2008). Within this wider theoretical frame, Delanty calls us to move beyond “normative, political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception” and see it as “socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself ” (2006: 25). In other words, one of cosmopolitanism’s major dimensions is that it opens up normative questions, that is, it allows us to imagine an alternative society. In order to interpret the significance of post-traditional urban festivals5 as expressions of contemporary society, Sassatelli (2011) uses the notion of cosmopolitanism as one of their key ingredients. Criticizing the fact that the scarce sociological and anthropological literature has been mainly driven by economic research focusing exclusively on economic returns, and thus on an instrumental vision of festivals, she argues that this tendency has contributed to reinforcing the idea that, from a cultural point of view, festivals are of little relevance since they are dominated by commercial, “inauthentic” logics. Taking them seriously by virtue of their sociability and experiential form, however, we may “trace the complex, polyvocal, discursive and relational field that the festival generates” (Sassatelli 2011: 17). She thus proposes to problematize clear-cut dichotomies between elite and ordinary, as well as between consumer and ethical cosmopolitanism that previous approaches established. The fact that contemporary festivals were introduced in order to reboot local economies through new consumption, as well as to demonstrate an openness to multiculturalism and multiethnicity, cannot be distinguished from more “ethical” forms, that is, from a cosmopolitan ethos of solidarity, which is based on combatting racism, protecting rights of displaced people and fostering inter-cultural dialogue and commitment to distant strangers (Sassatelli 2008: 33-35). Lalioti | Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival 135 Departing from this point of view, in the following sections I will show that Synch is a hybrid cultural site, that is, a site where people who belong to different cultural groupings can transcend their immediate selves and interact with members of other local and trans- local collectives. My aim is not to impose a specific theory on the analysis of my ethnographic material. Instead, drawing on the theoretical perspectives of cosmopolitanism described above, I wish to achieve a better understanding of my research partners” festive experiences and the ways they negotiate local belongings in a global, rather than in a national, or even European, frame of reference. Entering the Field I first attended Synch in 2009, a few weeks after I began an ethnographic research of the electronic music scene in Athens. My interlocutors insisted that Synch was the festival I should attend if I wanted to get a picture of the different tendencies in the field. In general, my attempt to enter the field was a particularly difficult, exotic, discomforting and enchanting experience. Forty-year-olds, such as my friends and I, do not usually follow or participate in electronic music cultures in Greece. Those who do participate are mainly young people in their early twenties, although older goers (30-year-olds) are not rare. The main difficulties I faced were related to the complexities that stem from studying groups within a familiar urban setting (I have grown up and lived in Athens for most of my life), and to the blurred landscape of electronic music itself (what is electronic music?). According to Giannis,6 for example, one of the first musicians I met, “nowadays everything is electronic music, that is, whether you play rock, or jazz, or techno, since the entire process is electronic, whether your sources are electronic or digital, everything ends up in digital mixing and your final material is digital, either a sound file or a CD”. After a short period of wandering around crowded clubs very late at night (or very early in the morning ), listening to totally incomprehensible kinds of music and talking to “strange” people, I slowly began to recognize a few artists, sounds and places that made more sense to me. Finally, my fieldwork focused on specific clubs and bars (BIOS, K44, Stavros tou Notou, Six D.o.g.s.) that are either related to or commonly identified with the history and development of the more “artistic” (έντεχνη) electronic music, and with specific artists. Within the context of popular music studies, the term that refers to genres and sub- genres as techno, house, electro, hip-hop, trip-hop, electro-punk and progressive, is “electronic dance music” (EDM).7 In Greece, the electronic music scene is more focused on what is called “dance” and “experimental” music. In many events, bands combine artistic (έντεχνα) with dance elements and, during the last decade in particular, what we have is mainstream mixed with R&B and house. According to my interlocutors, four or five years ago distinctions were made mainly between mainstream and underground clubs, especially in Athens and Thessaloniki. However, owners of larger mainstream venues started to invite underground groups that had become quite popular. Thus, even musicians who did not perform mainstream genres had the opportunity to play in big clubs like Luv and Blend. But now this industry is gone. There is still a house and techno scene but it is one that is mostly Dancecult 5(2)136 aimed at an audience of music lovers. There are few big clubs for mainstream and a few smaller ones for more underground and experimental music. Theoretically there are three tendencies in the European electronic music scene, of which Greece is considered to be a part: a) the experimental electric, electroacoustic music, that is, experimentations by jazz musicians who have a classical education (like the music of Xenakis and Stockhousen), b) the strictly dance scene, which includes mainstream and underground, and c) what is found between the former two and is known as the indie (independent) music scene. In smaller clubs today, however, dance music coexists with experimental and distinctions between electronic music, indie or experimental and dance become blurred. Since my interlocutors themselves use the term “electronic music” instead of EDM, I prefer to also use this term in this paper. As it was mentioned above, Synch was first held in June 2004 in Lavrio, in the Technological and Cultural Park - an historical and industrial area of 200.000sq.m, which is used for academic/research, educational, business and cultural activities. It lasted for three days and it included various streams of electronic music, architecture, video and other visual arts. In 2006 Synch became part of the Athens and Epidaurus Festival and since then it takes place in the Athens city center. It is under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture, the Municipality of Athens, the Hellenic Tourism Organization, the Prefecture of Eastern Attica and the Secretariat General of Information and Communication. It is predominantly financed by public institutions, thus keeping the ticket prices relatively low (they range from 30 to 45 euros per day). Although more than forty-five thousand people and hundreds of artists have participated in the festival, the economic crisis led to its scaling down to two days in 2010 and to a “tribute to silence” in 2011 (see next chapter). Synch and the City City festivals provide concentrated versions of local, regional, national and transnational encounters and often thematize the art of living together that the city has always represented thus claiming a special tie with cosmopolitanism (Parker 2004). As I show next, the relationship between Synch and the local identity, although a significant element in its development and success, it nonetheless constitutes a negotiated space; a space in which multiple belongings and identities are constantly at play. People who participate in Synch, either as artists or as members of the audience, are mainly young locals. They often come from middle and upper socioeconomic strata, and travel a lot—for studies or leisure—in Europe and other parts of the world, thus probably representing an elite (although not small) minority of the Greek population.8 Very often, however, they live in other regions of Greece, they are older, immigrants from African, Asian and European countries, and come from lower socioeconomic strata. Synch, thus, allows the emergence of a group of a “culture of cosmopolitanism”, based not so much on traditional socioeconomic criteria, but on the availability of global symbols and narratives due to the media and popular culture, as well as physical and virtual travel (Szerszynski Lalioti | Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival 137 and Urry 2002). Electronic music itself can be considered such a global symbol that allows definitions of the self and the other beyond local and ethnic identities ( Jeffery 2010). This was made very clear by Petros,9 one of my key-interlocutors, who had played in Synch twice. He is thirty years old, a PhD student, and a noteworthy experimental electronica artist: Author: How would you call your music? Petros: Music [laughs] Is it Greek music? Yes, why not? I am Greek. Until I get a new passport … it sounds funny. If I asked you to put it in a category? Category … I don’t know. Contemporary (σύγ χρονη) music, I believe. What do you mean by contemporary music? It is the music you make when you express yourself specifically, in your specific time and place. The creation of new and the strengthening of already extensive networks of professionals in electronic music also makes Synch a site for the negotiation of cosmopolitan (local- translocal) identities. There is a small electronic music industry in Athens, dealing with its creation, promotion and consumption. In 2010 for example, Synch, in collaboration with the “SAE Athens” School of Sound Engineering and Musical Technolog y, organized a series of seminars and workshops for professionals and amateur music producers. In 2007, Record Labeling , a record company, organized a seminar for practicing and future professionals such as musicians, producers, label managers, distributors and salesmen. During their lectures, Markus Detmer (of the Staubgold company in Berlin) and Philippe Petit (of the BiP-HOp company in Marseille) covered various aspects of establishing and managing an independent record label, as well as well as issues related to the manufacturing of compact discs, Internet-only projects, concert promotion and copyright. Synch draws part of its appeal from the local identity and the cultural context of the city, whilst it contributes to the strengthening of the identity of Athens as a cultural and tourist centre. Athens is an emblem of a glorious culture of the past—“contested” not only by locals but by “the world” too with a long history inscribed on its monuments and archaeological sites; an attractive tourist destination.10 The organization of a variety of cultural, athletic and other events are also aimed to an international tourist market and reflect aspects of contemporary life.11 Synch is considered to be one of the most important international music events of Athens in terms of its capacity to promote the city image through the participation of foreign artists and audiences and its international press coverage. In 2007 Synch was invited to participate in the Luxemburg Cultural Capital of Europe, as well as to the “Europareise” (Travel around Europe) organized by c/o Pop of Cologne, one of the biggest European festivals. In the same year it won the best European festival award in the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards. Acknowledging the festival’s contribution to the development of the city’s cultural image and the local cultural identity abroad, government and local authorities as well as public institutions took Synch under their aegis. In 2006 Dancecult 5(2)138 it became part of the Athens and Epidaurus Festival (“Greek Festival”). It is a theater, music and dance festival that was founded in 1955, and its history is embedded within the adventures of the wider sociopolitical history of Greece during that period. In search of a “new identity—a festival that is inclusive, that reflects its host city, and that brings the livelier aspects of society back into play”, its organizers decided to: systematically open up the Festival to cutting-edge international productions, and to promote young Greek artists who have something to say to contemporary audiences. To spread the events of this arts festival across the entire city, to seek out new and different audiences, and to cater for ever more arts lovers through the select events of a contemporary festival (Greek Festival, official website). Within this context, Synch was introduced as a key festival in the strategic development of the regional cultural policy for Athens with the goal of promoting contemporary Greek music and artists nationally and internationally. Its success (according to organizers, musicians and audiences) enables the festival organizers to plan smaller events in other cities of Greece and of the world. As the art director of Synch said: I believe that five years from now the festival will attract an audience from all over the world and will, of course, be one of the inseparable cultural events of the hellenic summer, travelling , during the months before the festival, to various cities of the world and Greece, organizing Pre-Synch Events aiming at synchronization (συγ χρονισμό) with various cultural realities (Papaioannou 2006). The significance that the organizers attribute to the transcendence of the festival’s local boundaries is also manifested in the letter they uploaded on Synch’s site, apologizing to the public for its absence in 2011: Tribute to Silence Dear Friends of Synch, We apologize for the late announcement to all of you, artists, collaborators and of course audience, that you, since 2004, support us and with the help of all of you Synch has been raised to one of the most famous and quality festivals of Europe. This year Synch is dedicated to silence. We so need it to plan the second phase of the festival to evolve and at the same time to develop its potential content not only in the frame of a two day Festival in Athens, but also in other places and spaces inside and outside Greece, creating the conditions for the next step of Synch. Stay in synch;-) (Synch Festival official website 2011). One of the side effects of the economic crisis was the scaling down of the 2010 festival to two days, hosting a smaller number of groups and having fewer people attending , especially on the first day. Despite the problems, Synch still represents “the only significant live music event of the summer, the feast of the electronic music in Athens” (Fotis, 37 year old, manager of a record shop).12 This feast, however, is not only connected to local and ethnic identities, Lalioti | Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival 139 but to a mix of global identities of the electronic music culture itself, as Natali Tsirigoti, head of Synch’s Press and Communication Office, argued: Everyone respects and supports it. Especially now, after 5 years, its reputation has been spread to all international art agencies since everyone were going back with the best of impressions. The fact that many well-known artists ask for an invitation to participate in Synch is not out of chance. It goes without saying that they are positively influenced by our being under the aegis of the Athens Festival (2008). In everyday discourse Synch is very often compared and related to the Sónar Festival13 in Barcelona: “I really enjoyed it. I feel like I gained one more day in Sónar!,” said Maria. Europe, however, constitutes part of the wider, international context of the digital culture scene. More specifically, new technologies constitute a defining element of Synch itself: from 2004 until 2006 its subtitle was “Electronic Music and Digital Arts”, from 2007 until 2009 it was “Innovative Music, Moving Image, New Media”, while in 2010 it became “Innovative Music, Workshops, Market”. According to a view in the press, the art director of Synch “put Greece on the world festival map” since its philosophy has been to present to the Greek and international audience, young and established artists from around the world as well as all current trends in the fields of music, new media and moving picture. Its creators claim that Synch’s aim is to develop “the idea of the cultural promotion of a new audiovisual adventure”, and to “attract, through a communication platform, artists and creative people from Greece and the whole world” (Papaioannou 2006). Innovations in electronic technolog y, arts and music are, thus, perceived to merge at the international level, to be borderless. They are considered to be a way of expressing , and a field for cultivating cosmopolitan attitudes, open to aesthetic and artistic trends on global scale and not just at a European level (Skrbis and Woodward 2007; Szerszynski and Urry 2002). Participation and Communication According to Gadamer (1986) festivals are very important because they are occasions where we can be united and communicate with one another beyond class, educational background, ethnic or cultural origin. Those who participate in them are embedded in a play that goes beyond their subjective choice, activity and intending , thus making it impossible for someone to describe exactly what happens (it can never be the same for all participants). Participation, however, requires some degree of immersion, inclusion, being together and communication.14 One cannot celebrate alone and whoever participates in a festival wants to communicate. Communicating , however, does not necessarily mean the exchange of words, it is more about being together, rather than about agreeing about this or that (Grondin 2001: 46). A capacity to enjoy cultural diversity and pluralism may be created, a capacity that is not only experienced by the individuals often labeled as “cosmopolitans” but is itself “a product of creativity and communication in the context of diversity” (Werbner 2008: 2). Synch takes place in Technopolis (Τεχνόπολις) and in Benaki Museum (Pireos Street Building ), although in an informal way it includes other places in the city center like bars, Dancecult 5(2)140 clubs, shops and town squares where festival participants can meet and interact with each other. Technopolis (Greek for Αrtcity) is an industrial complex of 30 acres that used to house a gas factory but now belongs to the Municipality of Athens. It is located in Gazi (Γκάζι), an area very close to the Acropolis that used to be a working-class historical district of Athens. In the beginning of the decade of 2000, however, Gazi became a center for alternative artistic and queer experimentations—it is inscribed in the collective consciousness as a gay friendly area because of the big concentration of gay oriented businesses and houses of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) people. Although these experimentations have given their place to an unlimited and unconditional development that led to violent transformations and to extreme commercialization (Giannakopoulos 2010), Gazi still constitutes a cultural hub and one of the most lively and active neighborhoods of the city. Apart from Synch, Technopolis hosts concerts, painting , sculpture and photography exhibitions, theatrical performances, film projections and conferences. A few blocks away from Technopolis, in Pireos Street, there is the New Benaki Museum building. It is the oldest museum in Greece—it was founded in 1931—with exhibitions that cover the history of the Hellenic world from antiquity until our days, as well as collections of Chinese, Pre-columbian, Islamic and Coptic art. The New Benaki Museum building hosts various contemporary Greek and international visual and plastic arts exhibitions, theatrical performances and music concerts. Participating in Synch festival is a complex activity. It involves walking around, drinking , eating , singing , dancing , watching , but perhaps most importantly, taking pleasure in interacting with other people: “…the important thing is the feast itself. You have this communicational power of the festival that will bring together very different people”. By “different people”, Nikos (a thirty year old bar-tender, who is also a graduate of the National School of Drama and a member of a professional theater group)15 means that not all of them share the same aesthetic and musical interests. In the first years of the festival there were two clearly distinct groups of audience: one from the electro-acoustic scene and one from the club culture and the dance scene. Today however this distinction is partially blurred and the audience is actually composed of people with different interests in music, dancing and electronic culture in general. Coexisting in the same space and time, but especially rehearsing and working toward common goals, artists too, create friendships, knowledge and contingent alliances (Albahari 2008). Petros described this coexistence in Synch: “Yes, of course I met musicians from abroad. Some of them I already knew, we hang out together, we had a few beers, and we wrote some things together”. In 2009 and 2010, as in previous years, musicians who participated were from various ethnic and/or cultural origins like Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, US, Japan, Brazil, New Zealand and Greece. Participating artists also expressed different styles and came from a variety of music backgrounds. Not only did they appear in the same festival, some performed on stage together. For example Tony Allen, the Nigerian drummer of Fela Kuti (afrobeat) played with Jimi Tenor (electro-jazz) and Blixa Bargeld, frontman of Einsturzende Neubauten (industrial band), and for many years guitarist of the Bad Seeds Lalioti | Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival 141 (australian alternative rock band) played with Alva Noto (electronic minimalism). In 2009, Mulatu Astatke (Ethio jazz) played with The Heliocentrics (hip-hop, funk, jazz, psychedelic, electronic, avant-garde and ethnic music). These social relationships and cultural dialogues, irrespective of their being considered as aesthetically sound or enjoyable, may imply the creation of new meanings and practices, and not just a mere exchange of understandings already available to individual participants. Technopolis has two open stages that host the more popular concerts. The audiences there “are bigger and more open” sing and dance to the music of the most celebrated international performers, and there is a “big hubbub” (νταβαντούρι) (Maria, member of the audience, 28 year old, nurse).16 There are also three closed rooms for “alternative, experimental artists” and ways for audience to interact and meet people, for those who, according to Maria, have a “more serious” relationship with the music. These spaces are smaller, allowing for a more direct contact, including eye contact, between performers and members of the audience. The fact that people usually do not know the artist they are going to see and since they are moving around the open stages and closed rooms, might imply, however, that the boundaries between the different groups are not so clear. People are rather driven by curiosity, by the need to “experience something new, something different”, said Alexandros (32 year old, chemist and musician who performed in Synch).17 Boundaries between live music performances and other activities that take place at the same time are also not clear. Installations, videos, internet art, film festivals, lectures and workshops allow participants to meet in various closed and open spaces in Technopolis and Benaki Museum, to communicate and get involved in many different ways. According to Papaioannou’s video interview to ελculture.gr, a website with daily information about culture (e.g. theatre, dance, music, festivals): These meeting points between music, video, lectures, workshops and installations, express the concept of synchronization, which is the main concept of the festival: all of Synch is a cultural proposition through workshops, videos, and music. When you go somewhere it is a total feeling. You do not just turn the television on and leave. They are all on the same level. . . . The planning philosophy of Synch is to create the sense that you are in a musical trip. It is something we continuously work on for six years now. It is a total performance event. It is a thing that is alive. It is a living organism (“Synch Festival 2009”). Performances are not objects or things but practices, events and behaviors (Schechner 2006: 1–2). As a total performance event, characterized by liveness and movement, Synch does not represent a specific identity but constitutes a process of becoming in a Deleuzian sense (Cull 2009: 2–3). Becoming is an attempt to come into close contact, to encounter the other while preserving or respecting one’s own relations and world. As most of my interlocutors argued, through participation in the many and different activities of Synch, they seek to bond with artists they already know or with others they don’t know yet, and to share with their friends and other participants this feeling of togetherness. The feeling Dancecult 5(2)142 of togetherness does not necessarily presuppose sameness. What participants rather share at Synch is difference. Differences are bridges rather than gaps thus and boundaries—be they aesthetic, generic, cultural or ethnic—are experienced not only as that at which something stops, but as that from which something begins to take shape (Deleuze 1994): a trip, an active process “of becoming more open to the other” (Kostas, thirty one year old, unemployed journalist).18 What attracts participants to Synch is its heterogeneity, its multiplicity and open-endedness, the “encounter with the not-yet-known that leads to synchrony” (Kostas) although it does not depart from similarity of habits and styles. Rather than being an experience of a totalisable collectivity, of an assemblage defined by its abiding identity or principle of sameness over time, synchrony, which also constitutes the motto of the festival and its clearly expressed aim, is closer to a deep sense of oneness with others through moving , sounding , listening , seeing and playing together.19 Although cosmopolitanism, according to Skrbis and Woodward (2007: 730), can be seen as opportunity for a wide range of experiences, this does not mean that it is always free of anxieties regarding “culture loss”. On the other hand, seen as a form of what is called “cultural omnivore” (Peterson 2005: 258–60), it can become a means of distinction, a learned indifference to the culture one supposedly belongs to. As I will show next, in either case, participants often view Synch as a threat to high culture since hybrids and mixed forms of what, in the context of electronic music and digital arts is perceived to be high and low, are very common. Hybridity When it was first staged, Synch constituted a new kind of event for Greece. It was different from the classical music events that had their roots in the rock festivals of the 1970s, as far as the concept on which they were based is concerned, as well as on the kind of experience they offered: “I would say that it is the most dignified festival, we do not have anything similar. When Rockwave20 went into decline, many years ago, Synch was the one to bring something more innovative (sic), newer, fresher that covered a big part of the audience here”, said Alexandros. It was widely considered to be an avant-garde festival intended for small audiences, but open to new experiences in the fields of contemporary music and new media, audiences. Its innovative and avant-garde character has been its most publicized element and the one that is supposed to attract artists and audience members: For a second year, the Synch Festival takes place in Greece, the most important activity in the field of electronic music and digital arts. The most avant-garde [event], for a second year in the Technological, Cultural Park of Lavrio. . . . A unique occasion for the lovers of contemporary technolog y, of contemporary art, and of course, of electronic music (Stefi Events 2005). However, according to participants, the history of Synch festival shows a process of the two cultural poles of high-brow and low-brow (Levine 1988; Peterson and Kern 1996) merging , while mainstream dance-based styles and experimental music and artists become Lalioti | Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival 143 more mixed. Most of my interlocutors agree that Synch began as an independent event, that is, “it used to bring more explorative performances”.21 As time went by and because of changes in the economic environment and trend (μόδα), the festival adjusted to the newly developing frame. Not “mainstream” (sic) but “different” (Eleni). Although it preserved the multimedia, experimental and technological character that it had from the beginning , this was reduced. Some believe that as long as it does not distort its character in order to attract bigger audiences to generate the necessary profit it is ok to adjust its content to trends. Others feel that its character has been distorted through time and although it began as a very avant-garde festival, it has now “come to the limits of “skyladiko” (σκυλάδικο)”. “Skyladiko” is a term that, during the decades of 1970s and 1980s, was used to denote specific night clubs with cheap, popular (λαϊκή) music performed by second class singers. Today the term refers to all music clubs that play folkpop music (μπουζούκια) whether singers are first or second-class names. All bad quality songs based on banal music patterns and cliché lyrics are called “skyladika’: Author: What do you mean skyladiko? Petros: It can go the dance or house music way. I call this skyladiko too. I have no problem. I may listen to skyladika of this kind too. I may go to a bar and have fun, but this is not music, this is background (sic) for looking at tits. Isn’t it a good thing that you can hear so many different things [at Synch]? It is so, this is a good thing. The bad thing is that the phase turns into a bordello when mix together so many disparate things, which do not have an affinity. I am not saying good or bad, but very different things. That is, for example, one comes to listen to a more intellectuelle (sic) music, a difficult thing , that he has to sit down and think about it. The other is a merry andrew and comes to Technopolis with chicks, with tits and beers. This thing is not right. We can see that Synch is a complex and multivocal field where participants experience dichotomies between authenticity and commerciality, as well as boundaries between high and low culture are not so clear. There is a long discussion about the specific historical transformations that have led to the problematization of such distinctions, and to the loss of the critical edge of avant-garde and easier, commercialized forms of art.22 Cosmopolitanism becomes a more useful concept for the analysis of such experiences and debates, since it was as cosmopolitanism that the challenge of high culture avant-garde art was conceived—praised or condemned—before it supposedly lost its critical edge to commercialization; that is, a challenge to dominant, national middle-class, capitalist values (Chaney 2002: 159–60). In other words, the loss of the critical “emancipative” function of aesthetic (high) culture was considered the price to pay to dispose of high cultural elitism, and thus a condition for the democratizaton of culture ( Jones 2007: 74). Hybridity and deconstruction of categories also refers to musical genres and the constant reconfiguration of the category of “electronic music” itself. Especially in recent years this tendency has led to the festival’s openness to many different styles and musical traditions: from electro, dance, house, techno, ambient, electronica to experimental, post rock, noise, Dancecult 5(2)144 electro latin and hip hop. When I asked Alexandros how he would define his music he told me: Alexandros: I don’t know exactly what it is I do to tell you the truth. Author: And does it not matter nowadays? Yes, things are so mix and match (sic) that if you ask me, I cannot tell you what I do. I just feel good with it. It may have 500 elements in it or it could be only one. That is, once you, as a listener, can communicate with X or Y you are listening to and you just like what you hear, it makes you feel good, you don’t have to put a label on it in order to explain the reasons why you like it. Hybridity also refers to the use of the spaces in which the festival takes place: Technopolis is a new, youth and alternative to mainstream culture urban space, while Benaki Museum is an institution with a long history in the promotion of more “serious” arts. It also refers to the coexistence of music with visual arts and other forms of culture that deconstructs categories and clear-cut boundaries. More specifically, apart from music, throughout its history, Synch included the following subunits: a) “Synch Arts”: in 2005, for example, it included interactive installations, videos and disc covers related to contemporary electronic music scene, b) “Synch Cinema”: in 2009 it presented “The Silent Movie Project”, that is, two-minute videos by creators from many different countries, c) “New Media”: in 2009 it presented Greek contemporary video art and multimedia installations, d) “Gatherings” (Syn_athroiseis): in 2009, artists and scholars discussed the relations between sound and space, memory and boundaries. Lectures and workshops also constitute inseparable parts of Synch festival. In 2009, social/cultural anthropologists, sound engineers and DJs, “starting from different points and following different paths” came together in order to “question the definitions and the boundaries of contemporary “electronic/digital” music, and discuss the relationships formed between music and various aspects of life with music, such as, entertainment, space, the internet and hearing” (Synch Festival official website 2009). Although specific political issues are not directly related to the organization of the festival, a wider democratic perspective, on the level of diversity of cultural activities and openness of access, is one of its constitutive elements: Through different stages and rooms we want to give people the opportunity to watch different things at the same time. If you do not like something you may go somewhere else. I think this is more democratic for the audience in relation to the ticket they pay. For us this is festival: a total experience (Papaioannou 2006). Democratization consists not only in giving the opportunity to access this artistic and musical aesthetic and academic approaches related to it but also in raising people’s cultural curiosity and educating the audience about digital culture: We did not imagine that something like that existed. My friend brought me here and I am very glad to discover something I did not know. New musics, artists. This is the meaning of this festival. Its power—due to the reputation it built all these years—to Lalioti | Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival 145 bring together so many different audiences, with such different origins, and allow them to communicate. I feel that now I can go deeper in things I wasn’t interested in until now, or I had not stumbled on (Panos, 26 year old, postgraduate student in computer science).23 Bringing together people with very different musical and aesthetic backgrounds and creating a context for creative interactions amongst all participants may lead to “different and interesting things”. For example, Panos, a big fan of the dance scene discovered other, more “artistic” (έντεχνες) aspects of the electronic music scene. Of course, this is not always the case. The line between kitsch and vanguard improvisation is often blurred. As a performance event and a total experience, however, Synch cultivates a democratic attitude in the sense of offering a broad audience the opportunity to come to contact and appreciate music and artists that are generally only appreciated inside specific niches or elites (Magaudda and Colombo 2010: 142). “Us” and the “Others”: Some Concluding Remarks Petros—and other Greek artists who participate in Synch—often combine western (e.g. jazz, electroacoustic) and traditional/folk (e.g. from the northern Greek regions of Macedonia and Epirus) elements in his music. This choice is part of a wider East-West musical orientation and, indeed, consciousness which is explored, negotiated, contested, developed and given a high profile in the popular music industry in Greece today (Dawe 2003). But this was not always the case. Until the 1990s western taste was supposed to be for the elites while the traditional, with its evident oriental elements, for the culture of the masses (Papageorgiou 1997). This antithesis reflected a bipole, which was dominant in perceptions of the Greek ethnic self since the foundation of the Greek nation state in 1832. More specifically, as the distinctive heirs of the ancient Greek civilization, which also constitutes the perpetual cultural matrix of Europe, Greeks belong to the West. In addition, the image of the East (mainly in association with Turkey and remnants of the era when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire) has been a common and convenient justification for the negative aspects of the Greek character, the peripheral placement of modern Greece in relation to the West, and the state’s inability to keep up with “progress” in Europe (Herzfeld 1982). Within this context, musical tradition has had great symbolic and political power and has played a significant role in the process of construction of Greek cultural identity. Greek politicians and elites identified the West with the “high Other”, and encouraged Greek people to imitate it, while casting the East as the “low Other”, which should be avoided (Cowan 1993). Due to the urgent political objective for Greece to conform to the European Union’s socioeconomic and living standards, however, this picture changed after the 1990s (Mouzelis 2002, Voulgaris 2008). Modernization required adaptation to western European social and political practices and rejection of nationalistic practices. In this frame, the general shift towards the use of global media communications, satellite TV and radio, Dancecult 5(2)146 Internet and link-ups between Greek and international music corporations opened up the country and its musicians to a new sound world and to audiences around the world.24 The “Orient”, in the form of the globalized “ethnic” Other, diffused the negative associations with the Ottoman past and the close links between the Greek and East-Mediterranean cultures began to be acceptable since they now constituted modernized “ethnic” cultural products (Dawe 2003). In this light the appearance of Giorgos Maggas—a Greek Roma clarinet player, who combines Gypsy music with tsifteteli and traditional Greek rhythms— in 2005 on the stage of Synch with the Tuxedomoon, although harshly criticized, was not fully denounced (watch video “Tuxedomoon VS Yorgos Maggas 2 @ Synch Festival”). In many respects, Synch festival contributes to the opening up of the country to the world as it gives participants an opportunity to negotiate hybrid local belongings in a global, rather than in a national, or even European, frame of reference. As a total performance event, that is, as a set of relations and happenings, Synch does not represent a specific identity but rather, within the context of diversity, encourages participants to enjoy cultural pluralism and become cosmopolitans. More specifically, cosmopolitanism is produced and reproduced by the complex relationship of Synch with the local identity. Although local identity is a significant element in the festival’s development and success, it nonetheless constitutes a negotiated space. Thus, on the one hand, electronic music itself is perceived as a global (beyond eastern-western dichotomies) symbol and innovations in electronic technolog y, arts and music as borderless. On the other hand, Synch supports networks of people working in the field of electronic music in Athens but it also expands their ties with other European and international professionals. It is closely related to the strengthening of the identity of Athens as a cultural and tourist city, but its organizers, artists and audiences also place special emphasis on the transcendence of the festival’s local boundaries through international promotion and the organization of smaller events in other cities of Greece and of the world. Synch becomes a site where different aesthetic and musical interests (mainstream and experimental, authentic and commercial or high and low), musical styles and traditions (electro-acoustic scene and club culture and dance scene), spaces and artists-performers interactions (open/closed, youth and alternative/mainstream and “serious’), music and other activities (visual arts, workshops and lectures) connect rather than divide participants. Participation at Synch—like in any festival—requires some degree of being together and communication. Communication amongst people of various interests does not necessarily mean the exchange of words. The fact that they coexist in various places inside Technopolis and in the city center, they rehearse and work together, they dance, eat, drink and walk around, and they come to contact with new musical and other art genres allows them to take pleasure in interacting with other people and enjoy the feast – probably the most significant aspect of the festival itself. Communication does not require agreeing about this or that. Thus, the fact that Synch, once considered a very avant-garde festival, promotes the deconstruction of fixed boundaries between styles, traditions, genres and spaces is perceived by some musicians and audience members as a decline, whilst by others as a more open and democratic choice. Lalioti | Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival 147 Notes 1 Elissavet, interview with the author, 14 June 2009. 2 See also Lalioti (2012), where concepts of liveness, embodiment and materiality in electronic music performances in Athens are being discussed. 3 For extensive reviews, see Gilbert and Lo (2007) and Rapport (2012). 4 Especially the work of Appadurai (1996) was particularly influential. Rather than seeing globalization as an irreversible and homogenizing force from above, he emphasized the emerging possibilities produced by local negotiations of transnational currents. 5 With this term, Sassatelli (2011) refers to the growing number of festivals in recent decades with an enduring relationship to urban settings. She contrasts them to earlier anthropological perceptions of festivals as organic expressions of the so-called traditional societies and as platforms for the representation and reproduction of their identities. 6 Giannis, interview with the author, 26 February 2009. 7 There is an extensive literature on the origins, history, and typolog y of EDM. For an exploration of various issues related to it from a broad range of academic disciplines, see Butler (2012). 8 At least this was the case before the crisis, which is violently transforming and impoverishing Greek society. The investigation of the connection between Synch, economic crisis and locality, although of great interest, is beyond the scope of the present paper. 9 Petros, interview with the author, 11 October 2010. 10 The local/global dimension of the Classical Greek heritage is one of the most widely discussed issues related to the Greek nation, nationalism and national/ethnic identity. See Yalouri (2001). 11 Although, for example, the 2004 Olympic Games and the organization of various (music, theatre, cinema, etc.) festivals during the past decade reinforced the image of Athens as an international attraction for tourists, the city is far beyond Rome, Barcelona and Istanbul, which are considered to be its main competitors. This is due to issues related to the environment, tourism policies, quality of life and services and prices (Lagos et. al. 2008). 12 Fotis, interview with the author, 12 June 2009. 13 For Sónar festival, see Chalcraft and Magaudda (2011). 14 According to Ehrenreich (2007), communal rituals of dance and celebration in different times and cultures have expressed the joy of life. Despite the centuries of repression by the forces of the so-called “civilization”, festivity keeps bubbling up because it is nearly as innate as the quest for food and shelter. 15 Nikos, interview with the author, 13 June 2009. 16 Maria, interview with the author, 5 June 2010. 17 Alexandros, interview with the author, 7 October 2010. 18 Kostas, interview with the author, 7 June 2010. 19 Drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze and Guattari, Saldanha (2002) shows how, in the multiracial tourist environment of Goa, music is capable of organizing “factions” of bodies along dynamic socio-spatial boundaries. Dancecult 5(2)148 20 Rockwave is an annual rock-pop festival in Athens, which was first held in 1996 . 21 Eleni, interview with the author, 12 June 2009. 22 Adorno’s critique of the cultural industries is one of the best-known. 23 Panos, interview with the author, 4 June 2010. 24 Analysing the music of a Singaporean artist, Kong (1996) illustrates how music is both an expression of local/national influences and reflective of the power of globalising forces. References Adorno, Theodor W. 2001. “Culture Industry Reconsidered”. In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, eds. Theodor W. Adorno and Jay M. Bernstein, 98–106. London: Routledge. Albahari, Maurizio. 2008. “Staging Cosmopolitanism”. ISIM Review 22: 12–13. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, J. Mark, 2012. Electronics, Dance and Club Music. (The Library of Essays on Popular Music). Aldershot: Ashgate. Chalcraft, Jasper and Paolo Magaudda. 2011. “‘Space is the Place’: the Global Localities of the Sónar and WOMAD Music Festivals”. In Festivals and Cultural Public Sphere, eds. Liana Giorgi, Monica Sassatelli and Gerard Delanty, 173–89. London and New York: Routledge. Chaney, David. 2002. “Cosmopolitan Art and Cultural Citizenship”. Theory, Culture and Society 19(1-2): 157–74. Clifford, James. 1992. “Traveling Cultures”. In Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg , Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler and Linda Baughman, 96–116. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Mitchell. 1992. “Rooted Cosmopolitanism”. Dissent (Fall): 477–83. Cowan, Jane K. 1993. “Politics, Identity and Popular Music in Contemporary Greece”. Kampos: Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek 1(1): 1–21. Cull, Laura. 2009. “Introduction”. In Deleuze and Performance, ed. Laura Cull, 1–21. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dawe, Kevin. 2003. “Between East and West: Contemporary Grooves in Greek Popular Music (c. 1990-2000)”. In Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Music and Global Sounds, ed. Goffredo Plastino, 221–40. New York: Routledge. Delanty, Gerard. 2006. “The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory”. The British Journal of Sociolog y 57(1): 25–47. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994 [1968]. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1976 [1915]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain. London: George Allen and Unwin. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2007. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. New York: Metropolitan Books. Lalioti | Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival 149 Falassi, Alessandro. 1987. Time out of time: Essays of the Festival. New Mexico: New Mexico University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1986 [1977]. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Getz, Donald. 2010. “The Nature and Scope of Festival Studies”. International Journal of Event Management Research 5(1): 1–47. Giannakopoulos, Kostas. 2010. “Ένα Kενό Mέσα στην Πόλη: Χώρος, Διαφορά και Ουτοπία στον Κεραμεικό και το Γκάζι”. In Αμφισβητούμενοι Χώροι στην Πόλη. Χωρικές Προσεγγίσεις του Πολιτισμού, eds. Kostas Giannakopoulos and Giannis Giannitsiotis, 117–38. Athens: Αλεξάνδρεια, Πανεπιστήμιο Αιγαίου. Gilbert Helen and Jacqueline Lo. 2007. Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Greek Festival official website. (accessed 23 January 2012). Grondin, Jean. 2001. “Play, Festival, and Ritual in Gadamer: On the Theme of the Immemorial in his Later Works”. In Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, ed. Lawrence K. Schmidt, 43–50. Lanham (Maryland): Lexington Books. Herzfeld, Michael. 1986. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideolog y, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press. Inda, Jonathan X. and Renato Rosaldo. 2008. “Tracking Global Flows”. In The Anthropolog y of Globalization: A Reader, eds. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, 3–46. Malden, Mass: Blackwell. Jaimangal-Jones, Dewi, Annette Pritchard and Nigel Morgan. 2010. “Going the Distance: Locating Journey, Liminality and Rites of Passage in Dance Music Experiences”. Leisure Studies 29(3): 253–68. Jeffery, Laura. 2010. “Creole Festivals and Afro-Creole Cosmopolitanisms in Mauritius”. Social Anthropolog y 18(4): 425–32. Jones, Paul. 2007. “Beyond the Semantic “Big Bang’: Cultural Sociolog y and an Aesthetic Public Sphere”. Cultural Sociolog y 1(1): 73 –95. Kallimopoulou, Eleni. 2009. Paradosiaká: Music, Meaning and Identity in Modern Greece. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kong , Lily. 1996. “Popular Music in Singapore: Exploring Local Cultures, Global Resources, and Regional Identities”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14(3): 273–92. Lagos, Dimitris, Thedoros A. Stavrinoudis and Hariklia Kampani. 2008. “Τουρισμός Πόλεων, μια Δυναμικά Αναπτυσσόμενη Αγορά στην Ευρώπη: Η Περίπτωση της Αθήνας”. Πρακτικά του 2ου Εθνικού Επιστημονικού Συνεδρίου Τουρισμού, 1–16. Αθήνα: Ακαδημία Τουριστικών Ερευνών και Μελετών. Lalioti, Vassiliki. 2012. “Beyond “Live” and “Dead” in Popular Electronic Music performances in Athens”. TRANS-Revista Transcultural de Música/Transcultural Music Review 16 [Fecha deconsulta: dd/mm/aa]: . Levine, W. Lawrence. 1988. Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. USA: Harvard University Press. Dancecult 5(2)150 Magaudda, Paolo, and Alba Colombo. 2010. “The Sónar Festival.” In Arts Festival and European Public Culture. Euro-festival Project Report, ed. Liana Giorgi, 130–49. . Mouzelis, Nikos. 2002. Από την Αλλαγή στον Εκσυγ χρονισμό. Αθήνα: Θεμέλιο. Papageorgiou, Fouli T. 1997. “Popular Music and the Music Industry in Greece”. In Whose Master’s Voice? The Development of Popular Music in Thirteen Countries, ed. Alison Ewbank and Fouli T. Papageorgiou, 67–87. Westport-Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. Papaioannou, Dimitris. 2006. “Interview to Sofia Ignatidou”. (accessed 8 March 2011). Papanikolaou, Dimitris. 2007. Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece. London: Legenda. Parker, Simon. 2004. Urban Theory and the Urban Experience. Encountering the City. London: Routledge. Peterson, Richard A. 2005. “Problems in Comparative Research: The Example of Omnivorousness”. Poetics 33: 257–82. Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. 1996. “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61: 900–07. Picard, David, and Mike Robinson. 2006. “Remaking Worlds: Festivals, Tourism and Change”. In Festivals, Tourism and Social Change, eds. David Picard and Mike Robinson, 1–31. Clevendon, Buffalo, Toronto: Channel View Publications. Polychronakis, Ioannis. 2007. “Anna Vissi: The Greek Madonna?”. Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (Norrköping ): INTER: A European Cultural Studies Conference in Sweden. Available online at . Rabinow, Paul. 1986. “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropolog y”. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 234–61. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rapport, Nigel. 2012. Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropolog y. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. Saldanha, Arun. 2002. “Music Tourism and Factions of Bodies in Goa”. Tourist Studies 2: 43–62. Sassatelli, Monica. 2011. “Urban Festivals and the Cultural public Sphere: Cosmopolitanism between Ethics and Aesthetics”. In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, ed. Liana Giorgi, Monica Sassatelli, Gerard Delanty, 12–28. Oxon, New York: Routledge. ———. 2008. European Public Culture and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism. Euro-festival Project Report. . Schechner, Richard. 2006. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Skrbis, Zlatko and Ian Woodward. 2007. “The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitan Openness”. The Sociological Review 55(4):730–47. St John, Graham. 2009. “Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival”. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 1(1): 35–64. Stefi Events. 2005. (accessed 13 September 2011). Lalioti | Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival 151 Stokes, Martin. 2007. “On Musical Cosmopolitanism”. The Macalester International Roundtable 2007. Paper 3. Available online at . Synch Festival official website. 2011. (accessed 5 June 2011). ———. 2009. “Exploring and Crossing the Boundaries of “Electronic/Digital” Music”. (accessed 7 June 2011). Szerszynski, Bronislaw and John Urry. 2002. “Cultures of Cosmopolitanism”. Sociological Review 50(4): 461–81. Tragaki, Dafni. 2007. Rebetiko Worlds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Turino, Thomas. 2003. “Are We Global Yet? Globalist Discourse, Cultural Formations and the Study of Zimbabwean Popular Music”. British Journal of Ethnomusicolog y 12(2): 51–80. Tsioulakis, Ioannis. 2011. “Jazz in Athens: Frustrated Cosmopolitans in a Music Subculture”. Ethnomusicolog y Forum 20(2): 175–99. Tsirigoti, Natali. 2008. “Synch(roni)city Culture”. Interview with Kostas. G. Karderinis. 06 June: (accessed 11 September 2011). Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. Voulgaris, Giannis. 2008. Η Ελλάδα από τη Μεταπολίτευση στην Παγκοσμιοποίηση. Αθήνα: Πόλις. Werbner, Pnina. 2008. “Introductions: Towards a New Cosmopolitan Anthropolog y”. In Anthropolog y and New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, ed. Pnina Werbner, 1–29. Oxford: Bergh Publishers. ———. 1999. “Global Pathways: Working-Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds”. Social Anthropolog y 7(1): 17–35. Yalouri, Eleana. 2001. The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim. Oxford, New York: Berg. Filmography “Synch Festival 2009”. 2009. ελculture.gr, 5:53. (accessed 20 September 2009). “Tuxedomoon VS Yorgos Maggas 2 @ Synch Festival”. 2005. YouTube, 4:11. (accessed 11 June 2013).