Electronic Dance Music Festivals in Romania: A Case of Reversed Balkanism

Processes of ‘self-exoticization’ or ‘self-orientalization’ have been widely studied in contexts such as postsocialist Balkan film (Iordanova 2001: 61), Romani folk music (Szeman 2009: 103) and the repackaging of folklore into performance at the Eurovision Song Contest (Baker 2008). This chapter argues, however, that they have been particularly successful in the as-yet understud- ied case of electronic dance music festivals, which since the turn of the millennium have managed to profitably resolve the tension between EDM’s pleasure-seeking ethos and the Balkans’ intan- gible qualities. It explores this through the case of two Romanian electronic dance music (EDM) festivals, Untold and Neversea, which take place annually in the Transylvanian city of Cluj and the Black Sea port of Constanța, respectively. These festivals have resolved that tension through favourable cultural policies, hybridization and internationalization, as well as promotional strate- gies that mediated successfully between mythology and experience, darkness and lightness, centre and periphery, traditionalism and modernization. Since 2015, Untold’s contribution to rebranding, place-making and local development through the association between the city of Cluj and the festival thus became a blueprint for managing the post-socialist legacy of cultural control (Jucu 2020), while paving the way for the festivalization, urban gentrification and entrepreneurialization (Braniște 2021) that we can now witness in Romania and other parts of the Balkan region. Dance music has therefore managed to reverse, rewrite and repurpose regional typecasting as part of a larger process that this chapter terms ‘reversed balkanism’.