This chapter examines the wave of smaller performing arts festivals in North America and Europe that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. The author argues that this ‘second wave’ of international performing arts festivals prefigured the potential for new social relationships and artistic processes and shifted the event horizon around what constitutes a festival performance. To chart the ‘second wave’ is to diagram larger, systemic transformations from the cultural to creative industries, the rise of the ‘creative city’, and the rupturing of progressive social movements. This chapter links the imaginative realm of site-specific, socially engaged work and the activist realm of movement-building to explore how new forms of relational play exceed the very time of festival. If once international performing arts festivals were recruited to rebuild relations between nations, and later enrolled to bolster the economies of cities, ‘second-wave’ festivals have also shown that they can redistribute their resources to communities and support forms of belonging organized around the practice of place rather than its territorial claim over it.

On 4 July 2012, the skies over Ivyanets – a small town 70 kilometres outside Minsk, the capital of Belarus – changed unpredictably. Brown teddy bears attached to parachutes canopied the streets and demanded the attention of the locals. The bears clutched protest signs in English and Belarusian between their paws: ‘You cannot silence us’ and ‘Free speech now’. The airdrop, initially bound for Minsk, was meant to scatter free-speech signs over the presidential palace of dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Since 1994, Lukashenko has maintained his grip on power through such repressive tactics as censorship, vote-rigging and state violence. He operates as if the Iron Curtain that divided east and west Europe during the Cold War had never been lifted, and continues to run the country like a Soviet state. This includes the use of military and police – including the secret KGB service – to silence citizens who question his regime. At the hands of Lukashenko, Belarus' most prominent opposition leaders, journalists, political activists, lawyers, academics and artists have faced imprisonment and torture, ‘disappeared’ without warning and ‘committed suicide’ on the eve of presidential elections. The unlikely campaigners of the more than 800 teddy-bear airdrop were not, however, Belarusian citizens. They were Studio Total, a Swedish advertising firm, who describe their action as ‘a performance to support democracy in Belarus’. This performance from above prevented a direct encounter with the despotic regime from below. It was at street level that a Belarusian journalism student, 20-year-old Anton Suryapin, did what young people just about everywhere do and posted the images online. This banal act of post-and-circulate resulted in the forced detention of Suryapin by the KGB, who now accuse the student of ‘assisting illegal entry’. Studio Total had illegally crossed into Belarusian airspace to campaign for Charter 97, an online organization that reports human rights abuses from inside Belarus, and the authors of the country's 1996 ‘Declaration of Resistance against Belarusian Dictatorship’.