Abstract
The huge free summer rock music festival was created by Jurek Owsiak in Poland in the mid-1990s as an extension of an annual national winter charity drive. While presenting musicians often past their prime, the festival attracts people who treat Woodstock Station as a place where they can celebrate their pride about helping others. Indeed, people are respectful toward others there to an extent unseen at other festivals. At Woodstock Station, the attendees take part in discussions with public figures, representatives of NGOs, state institutions, and the Catholic Church, negotiating the ideals of being a caring individual and member of Polish society, in a space they consider their own.
An interesting parallel to Owsiak’s local charity activities receiving significant media coverage is the 1985 Live Aid charity music festival, also discussed in this chapter, created by the Irish rock musician Bob Geldof, which peaked in 2005 as Live 8, the globally televised charity music festival.
Woodstock Station (Polish “Przystanek Woodstock”) is an annual free open-air music festival, held at the beginning of August, which has become a key element in the Polish summer festival calendar since its launch in 1995. With an audience of up to half a million people, mostly from Poland, but also Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Spain, the three-day event has grown into one of the biggest free music festivals in the world.Footnote 1 Woodstock Station was created by Jurek Owsiak , a popular TV and radio host, who is best known as the founder of the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity (in Polish, “Wielka Orkiestra Świątecznej Pomocy”), one of the largest organizations of this kind in Poland. The festival, a non-profit event in its own right based off the winter drive’s popularity, was organized as a gesture of appreciation for volunteers who take part in the January charity event. Though the free music festival attracted younger audiences without much money to spend, it also made the event less appealing to popular musicians who wanted to be paid for their performances, and to attendees looking for more contemporary music . Those who do attend are enthusiastic about the festival’s inviting atmosphere, the sense of freedom to do whatever one pleases there, and the unique sense of community not seen elsewhere, for which the music serves as a background. Though in the major Polish media the event has been forecasted to fail from its inception in the mid-1990s, Woodstock Station has been thriving ever since. What is more, the festival has become the site of a unique community —one that the attendees frequently emphasize in their discussions on Woodstock Station online forumsFootnote 2 and in my interviewsFootnote 3—connected to the cheerful and colorful Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity. Most of the people I talked to emphasized, “I love being with these people.” Sometimes, to illustrate this, my interviewees at the festival gave hugs to strangers standing around, who were clearly amused and did not oppose this burst of affection. The festivalgoers see each other as participants in an event not just about music, but one which provides them a space where they can feel proud of being part of Owsiak’s charity-related projects. “I came here because of Jurek,” was a statement I heard frequently from the attendees, regardless of their age. These charity events not only offer people a chance to engage in acts of generosity but, on a more general level, give them a platform to show sympathy toward others.
In general, Woodstock Station is a place where people come to celebrate a social reality in which such open sympathy is possible. It is a celebration of kindness in a democratic society, where it can be displayed not “against”—for example, an oppressive power , as was the case of Solidarity in the 1980s—but “toward” others. It is a reality no longer defined in black-and-white categories of “us” versus “them.” Woodstock Station serves as a prime example where one can notice the emergence of an inclusive community based on the principle of recognition. In their classic writings, David Hume and Adam Smith describe sympathy as a key value in society that is communicated between people. According to Hume, it is a positive disposition toward others, which is created within a larger community of strangers. They share the same values—the glue that ties a society together and allows people to have “sympathy with the interests of society” (1888, p. 580). Interestingly, at Woodstock Station, it is an idea that can be observed in people’s practices. What’s more, Hume argues that sympathy is a human virtue because people want to be part of a society; it is what makes society not a network of egoistic interests, but a public good. Owsiak’s events both promote and are an important channel for making this attitude of sympathy toward others visible in Poland today. I argue that this practice of sympathy —the recognition of others as part of a broad community —informs people’s social imaginary. Thus, I treat Woodstock Station as an “ordinary celebration” because it has become an established, widely known music event in Poland, which at the same time is a space where people can be openly, and enthusiastically, kind to others, and where they can celebrate this particular recognition of others. In this sense, the music festival, a clear extension of Owsiak’s charity drive, becomes a celebration of respect, an essential attitude that turns strangers into members of a shared community.
Prelude: Owsiak and the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity
Jurek Owsiak, a television and radio host popular among youth, became widely known in Poland in 1993 as the creator of the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity. An enthusiast of rock music and hippie culture, and an unlikely television celebrity because of his modest looks and stutter, in the early 1990s Owsiak created seemingly chaotic and absurd TV shows centered on rock music and youth culture, which quickly gained popularity among young people. After a chance meeting with doctors who told Owsiak about lacking equipment for newborns in Polish hospitals, he decided to organize the drive using his media popularity, and the youthful approach and aesthetic from his shows. The first Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity drive was held in 1993 and turned out to be a nationwide success no one had expected. In the years that followed, Owsiak was asked to organize the drive again and again, leading to an annual event that raises money for hospital equipment for newborns and also, more recently, for the elderly. The Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity drive is an unusual event for a number of reasons: at the beginning of the 1990s, a live, cheerful fundraiser was a novel concept on Polish television , where live broadcasts were usually done in a serious manner.Footnote 4 Yet the drive’s studio was colorful and messy, standing in stark contrast to dour live television of yore. The event was one of the first charity drives in post-1989 Poland, and the first to be created as a joyful celebration with heavy media coverage. Organized at the beginning of January, a cold and dark time of the year in Poland, the colorful happening plays on the cheerful Christmas holiday spirit, as if extending the holidays. Up-to-the-minute reports on the raised funds are aired from the seemingly chaotic, yet carefully organized, television studio, and, for the most part, enthusiastically repeated in national and local radio stations all over the country.
The organization of the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity drives has remained largely unchanged since its launch, despite growing exponentially in terms of coverage and fundraising.Footnote 5 The so-called grand finales, which are one-day drives, take place on a Sunday in January, on streets in big cities and small towns all over Poland. Volunteers, often teenagers and college students, collect money in specially marked tin cans. In return, donors receive red heart-shaped stickers with the name “Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity” written in big white letters, the organization’s logo. During the drives, it is easily noticeable on people’s dark-gray winter coats. Stages for musical performances are set up on town squares, in local cultural centers, and in schools where well-known bands perform next to amateurs, and different items (from silver rings to cars) are auctioned off to raise money for the charity. Since 2000, official Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity auctions are also held on the widely used Polish auction website, Allegro .Footnote 6 The main auction, however, takes place live in the television studio. Bidders phone to compete for the official, individually numbered Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity high-carat golden heart-shaped pins.Footnote 7 In between the TV auctions, local charity crews give brief reports on the raised sums and news on supporting local events. People present at these performances like to show off their heart stickers to the cameras—worn as badges of honor that demonstrate their donor status. Indeed, during the drive, it is hard to find people in city centers without them.
Owsiak succeeded in creating an annual youthful, music-filled, and widely visible celebration of charity in which many people, including celebrities and politicians, take part—including the current president Andrzej Duda, much to the dismay of other members of the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party, highly suspicious of Owsiak. The drives are inclusive in that any amount of donated money can get one a heart-shaped sticker; they allow people to feel, and show, that they are participating in meaningful change, as donations are counted almost immediately and reported live on television , radio, and, since the end of the 1990s, the internet .Footnote 8 Furthermore, the drive is based on mutual trust: volunteers collecting money are usually teenagers who walk the streets with nothing more than the charity’s identifiers hanging on their necks and with tin boxes for money. They have no protection save for other people’s sympathy , yet cases of thefts or of volunteers stealing money have been extremely rare.Footnote 9 In one instance that resulted in a court case, Owsiak testified that he considered such public control over fundraising to be the best form of revenue monitoring—a clear indication of the organization’s grassroots approach to charity based on mutual trust (Dobroczyński and Owsiak 1999, p. 133). This attitude of confidence in people’s honesty and kindness extends to Woodstock Station, and is strongly voiced by the music festival attendees.
The direct (stickers) and indirect forms of media (television ) make acts of charity widely visible. In turn, this visibility becomes a trigger that encourages the participation of others—and since a single penny of donation is enough to earn a sticker, it is easy to become a member of this community . The Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity makes giving easy, joyful, and an act to be openly proud of. Although after over two decades this approach appears commonplace, in 1993 it was nothing short of a revolution, following decades of Communist rule during which charity was practically banned. The event is not without its detractors, however, as it has been increasingly criticized by a number of conservative supporters of the Catholic Church—notably Catholic journalists, numerous members of the ruling Law and Justice party, and priests themselves—who believe charitable acts should be done quietly (TOK FM 2012; Morciniec 2013; Terlikowski 2013). Until the emergence of the “loud” Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity, the Church was the major charity institution in Poland. The new charity event operated much differently, and challenged the preexisting monopoly of the Church and its interpretation of charity as discreet, humble sacrifice that should not be mentioned publicly.
Communist Influence on Charity in Poland
Although charity is a religious concept of compassion for the poor, this type of activity was not limited solely to the religious realm in Polish culture. Ewa Leś (2001), a Polish scholar studying the history of charity, emphasizes that the Enlightenment led to a redefinition of charity from an act of loving God to an act of loving humans. Indeed, a significant number of charity organizations created by Poles in the nineteenth century were civic, patriotic, and secular, despite the state being partitioned between Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Prussia, and notwithstanding the key role played by the Church in maintaining the Polish national spirit. While some charities provided help to participants in failed Polish uprisings, and their families, others focused on collecting Polish art (Father Jarzębowski’s collection at the sanctuary in Licheń , mentioned in the previous chapter, is an example of the latter). Leś notes that charity regained its religious character only after the Polish state was reestablished as a result of World War I. However, these religious efforts restricted their aid to their own congregations (Jasiewicz 1990) and left secular institutions weakened. According to Leś, in the interwar period, social care was considered to be the responsibility of the official authorities, and after World War II, the Communists strengthened this preexisting notion by prohibiting most forms of charity.
At the onset of the Communist regime, charity was nationalized by the state alongside all other forms of free private enterprise. The Communists called charity a “bourgeois relic,” and instead encouraged theatrical, stage-managed “social acts” of charity to thwart any traces of individual acts of empathy the state could not control (Nowak 2004). Consequently, charitable work outside the state had to be hidden from the authorities. Despite this, several underground organizations developed in the 1970s. Most famous of them was the Workers’ Defense Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników ), helping families of workers who had been arrested for holding protests in factories against major price hikes. KOR provided workers’ families with money as well as medical and legal help, and became one of the first visible signs of civic organization in Communist Poland that was independent of the state. However, after martial law was declared at the end of 1981, thwarting the success of the Solidarity movement, the Church became the only viable influential institution still independent of the state, providing aid sent to Poland by religious institutions, secular organizations, and individuals from Western Europe.Footnote 10 At the same time, however, by extending its help to all those oppressed by the Communist state, the Polish Catholic Church strengthened its political role as an aid to pro-democratic dissidents, and more generally to Poles who fought against oppression. Because of this, at the beginning of the 1990s, the Catholic Church was a highly respected institution in Poland. Nevertheless, the quiet and humble style of charity it propagated could be seen not only as a continuation of a powerful Catholic tradition, but also as a result of decades of Communism , during which the state attempted to eliminate any traces of independent civic activity, including organized acts of empathy. The sudden emergence of the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity, just four years after the political transition, was an unexpected challenge to the Church’s monopoly on social kindness. Owsiak’s project offered a fundamental redefinition of how charity can look and feel for those who choose to contribute.Footnote 11
Woodstock Station Inspirations: Jarocin, Woodstock, and Northern Exposure
Woodstock Station, although founded on the tradition of rock festivals as sites of protest, unlike its predecessors, is an event where people come to celebrate the opportunity to engage in charitable acts in a free, democratic society.Footnote 12 If the festival is “opposed” to something, it is the reluctance of mainstream Polish media to notice that post-1989 reality is not only acknowledged by urban intellectual or financial elites but also shared by people in the Polish province. As such, Woodstock Station provides space for these people to become visible. What’s more, Woodstock Station can be viewed as a joyful communitas, described by the anthropologist Victor Turner (Turner and Turner 1978). Woodstock Station, as an inclusive event fueled by the practice of social sympathy , exemplifies this notion of communitas particularly well: Turner focuses on the significance of closeness that is created through shared experiences that bind people together, which in the case of Woodstock Station is the act of being together at the summer festival and participating in the winter charity drive. In this sense, Woodstock Station is an event that escapes customary definitions of a music festival: it is both participation and a space for expression of shared values; a platform for discussion between the principles shared by people as individuals and as members of society, with institutions that organize it; and a creation of an engaged public.
As a rock music enthusiast, in the beginning of the 1990s, Owsiak organized a well-known open-air punk music festival near Jarocin, a small town in western Poland. The so-called youth music festival had been launched in the 1970s but became more popular in the 1980s, a period of Solidarity , martial law, and political changes that led to democratic transition in 1989 . In a detailed monograph on the Jarocin festival , Lesiakowski, Perzyna and Toborek (2004) describe it as a space where young people showed their contempt for the Communist reality in a communal, joyful form. Yet the more famous the festival became, the less cheerful and more aggressive it turned, as the audience—usually punk and rock fans—engaged in fights with skinheads. Although these subcultures had their roots in Western European, particularly British, music (Hebdige 1988), in Poland they gained unique local elements that added an anti-Communist context to the Western punks’ idea of “no future.”Footnote 13 According to Lesiakowski et al., the fights between punks and skinheads at Jarocin were inspired by Communist secret police who wanted to tarnish the cheerful and increasingly anti-state image of the festival, even though authorities officially ignored the event and its young audience. Jarocin became a controlled, quasi-official vent for young people unhappy with their surrounding reality. Nevertheless, it was one of the few spaces in Communist Poland where young people felt they could actually voice their contempt without suffering repercussions. As the Jarocin festival lost its anti-Communist appeal after 1989 , attempts were made to commercialize the event. To the surprise of the entrepreneurial, profit-oriented organizers, it was taken over by the same aggressive youth interested in fights rather than the new bands promoted on stage, which they found too mainstream. Unable to attract new audiences who were frightened of the festival’s violent image shown in the major Polish media, Jarocin soon became unprofitable. The festival was finally canceled after a huge brawl in 1994, which ended up with 65 people hospitalized. Jarocin lost its unique character as a space where young people could freely express themselves with music , although memories of the festival as a place for youth, freedom, and punk music have remained strong. In 2005, the festival in Jarocin was once again revived as a ticketed event. Since then it has been successfully showcasing contemporary rock and alternative music , albeit in a far more organized and commercial manner.
Inspired by the success of the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity , Owsiak wanted to use his experience as a music host and event organizer to make a festival of his own.Footnote 14 However, the legend of Jarocin was not his only point of reference; another was the American Woodstock Festival. In 1994, Owsiak went to the United States to make a documentary about the festival’s 25th anniversary and came back impressed by its jubilant atmosphere and careful organization. It was very different from the chaotic Polish Jarocin, notorious for its audience famous for getting out of control. Owsiak wanted to make a music event that would merge rock music, ideals of freedom, a peaceful attitude, and proper organization. (One could argue his idea encapsulated a more general climate in Poland at the time: free, hopeful, and disorganized.) Thus, in 1995 the creator of the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity organized the first Woodstock Station, a free, open-air summer music festival that has since turned into the biggest annual event in Poland. Woodstock Station emerged as a gesture of appreciation to the mostly young volunteers who took part in the winter drive. At the same time, it was an opportunity for Owsiak to organize a music event he could use to show the artists he admired. According to Owsiak , the name of the festival linked two positive references: the original Woodstock Festival and an American television series Northern Exposure, which was very popular in Poland at the time. The show, about a friendly community in a small town in Alaska, was translated into Polish as Alaska Station (Przystanek Alaska). From the very beginning, Woodstock Station emphasized its own three-word motto: love, friendship, and music . It could be found on banners above the stage and on the festival T-shirts popular among the audience, and it encapsulated Owsiak’s idea for the festival as a contemporary event that referred to the late-1960s ideals of alternative hippie culture. However, unlike its inspirations, Woodstock Station was not intended as a space to question the hostile world outside. In the mid-1990s, Poland was a new democracy , only recently freed from an oppressive Communist regime. The country was undergoing significant political and economic changes that were supposed to bring the country closer to the West people aspired to, and there was a shared sense of optimism about the future. Woodstock Station, with its references to the joyous American Woodstock Festival and the Polish Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity , fit into this cultural zeitgeist. At the same time, Owsiak’s events showed that people feel good about helping others, and enjoy participating in a playful, visible community of recognition created around acts of kindness. And indeed, Woodstock Station was created as an extension of sympathetic togetherness, aimed mainly at young people, who were most likely to enjoy an open-air rock music festival.
Interlude: Band Aid, or Mediatizing Charity
Another inspiration behind Owsiak’s Woodstock Station , although mentioned far less often than Woodstock Festival , was a powerful international music and media event created in the UK a decade earlier by a punk musician. In 1984, Bob Geldof brought Band Aid to life by convincing major pop stars of the time to sing together a song he had written, called “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The record led to Live Aid the following year, the first “global,” simultaneously transmitted set of charity concerts, which took place in several cities all over the world. As Geldof , at the time the leader of a moderately successful band the Boomtown Rats, described in his autobiography (1986), the reason behind the song was outrage he felt after having watched a BBC documentary on the famine in Ethiopia. The punk rocker decided to get funds to help, and figured music , its popular appeal in particular, would be the right vehicle to do so. He persuaded pop stars, including Bono, Midge Ure, Phil Collins, Boy George, George Michael, Sting, and Paul Young, to take part in the recording, which proved a huge success, raising over 8 million pounds.
Geldof’s straightforwardness , similar to Owsiak’s , was found to be one of the reasons behind Band Aid’s success. Westley (1991), a scholar in social innovation, writes that it allowed Geldof to bypass formal hierarchies while remaining in touch with people who listened to the music and, as a result, made the pledge. According to Westley, Geldof employed three key elements that led to the success of his campaign. Firstly, instead of individuals, he cooperated with a network of musicians who were interested in charity work and in using music as a carrier of emotions that could become a call to action. Secondly, he contacted the artists before getting in touch with the record labels, potentially more interested in profits than charity . Thirdly, the music network he collaborated with was already international, thus making it easier to globalize the event in the form of the Live Aid concert in 1985 (Westley 1991, p. 1026). However, as Hague, Street, and Savigny (2008) point out, it is something of a paradox that a self-proclaimed anarchist would turn out so well-versed in the business side of the music industry, but his approach of what he termed “punk diplomacy”—get together the most popular stars to sing a moving song, and use the profits to help dying people—proved an unprecedented success. Twenty years later, he self-mockingly explained that the term “Band Aid ” was used in order to emphasize that “you can’t put a sticking plaster on a gaping wound” (Harvey 2004), nonetheless his action inspired a multitude of other celebrity-filled charity drives that emerged later. As a follow-up to the Band Aid record, Geldof organized Live Aid , a simultaneous two-continent, 16-hour-long concert, which was held on July 13, 1985, in the British capital and Philadelphia in the United States. The show was viewed live by 1.5 billion people all over the world—with the notable exception of the Eastern Bloc countries. It was one of many visible signs the Iron Curtain was yet to fall. Still, as a result of the heavily mediated concerts with an even more impressive roster of stars than those included in the “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” song, Live Aid raised over 150 million pounds (Levin 2010). During the event, Geldof shouted, “There’s people dying now, so just send us the fockin’ money!” and, as the numbers show, people did.
Live Aid proved so successful that Geldof recorded the song again 20 years later as Band Aid 20, this time to raise funds for the conflict-torn Darfur region in Sudan. The 2004 single, with a new generation of musicians in it (save for Bono and Paul McCartney), again topped the Christmas charts, although the lyrics were criticized for being dated and racist. Interestingly, these concerns proved a major obstacle during the most recent edition of the event, Band Aid 30 held in 2014 to raise funds to fight the spread of Ebola disease in Africa (Bacon 2014; Kealey 2014). Still, Live 8 , which was organized in July 2005 after the release of the new version of the song, was one of the most global charity concerts to date. Organized under the banner of “Make Poverty History” in ten cities located in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Africa, and Russia, and transmitted by 182 television stations around the world, the aim of the concerts was to influence participants of the G8 Summit held in Scotland a couple of days later to cancel debt owed by the poorest countries, half of them in Africa. While the G8 member states indeed pledged to aid Africa with the help of 25 billion dollars a year, much to Geldof’s joy (“A great justice has been done … Mission accomplished frankly”), the action was generally found unsuccessful as the countries later failed in providing the aid promised (Levin 2010; Rojek 2013). At the same time, Geldof was criticized for not showcasing artists from the countries he aimed to help and, from a different standpoint, by non-governmental organizations operating in Africa for “hijacking their hard work” on the ground (Hague et al. 2008, p. 6).
It is worth noting that during Live 8 the pop star Sting made a statement that encapsulates one of the key issues scholars studying the influence of celebrities on politics have been dealing with: “We’re actually creating a new form of democracy where you vote with your presence” (Hiatt 2005). For example, inspired by Live 8 , Street, Hague and Savigny (2008) ask whether participation in a music event can be equated with participation in politics. While for Habermas the public sphere includes art, it only becomes part of politics if it fosters change. Thus, Street et al. argue that Live 8 can be considered political participation, if people believe the musicians on stage to be acting as legitimate authorities, the “truth bearers” (Hague et al. 2008) who speak on behalf of “the people”; if the event has ties reaching beyond the music itself and the artists cooperate with professional non-governmental organizations ; and if the music acts as a vehicle of a political message. However, in the case of Live 8 the issue at stake is the political message itself. A number of scholars argue that celebrities publicly engaged in charity , such as Geldof , simply reinforce existing divisions between the so-called rich North and poor South, without confronting the more general conditions that, on the one hand, make countries in the Southern hemisphere poor and, on the other hand, make celebrities richer by the very virtue of their charity celebrity (Biccum 2007; Kapoor 2012; Rojek 2013).Footnote 15 According to these authors, this blindness toward what they label as neoliberal postcolonial order allows Geldof to write and Bono to sing “Well tonight thank God it’s them [Africans] instead of you,” and sell millions of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” records to people who indeed feel lucky to have not been born in a faraway, poverty-stricken country. Similar strong criticisms have also been voiced toward the 2007 spinoff of Live 8 , Live Earth , headed by the former US vice president and failed Democratic presidential candidate, Al Gore. Geldof was skeptical of the event not only because Live Earth mimicked Live 8 but also because he found the goal of “fighting the Climate Crisis” and demanding an international treaty to cut 90% of carbon emissions to be too broad a scope (Riding 2007). James Panton, a political scholar, wrote about the concert, “Cool mega music events might seem to produce cool politics too, but they are far less effective at connecting politicians with their voters and creating a sound debate on the issues.” (2007, p. 4) Given that according to a 2005 study, people find “third-world poverty … an off-puttingly complex subject” (The Economist 2005), simple answers offered by Geldof or Gore seem easier to follow and applaud. Live Earth , like its predecessors held in the summer month of July, included 150 musical acts on seven continents, this time providing 24-hour-long live coverage on television and the internet . As a result, the event was watched by two billion viewers (Rojek 2013, p. 132).
In his analysis of celebrity charity , Rojek frames this type of activity from the point of view of “celebrity attention capital.” According to the media scholar, by virtue of their fame, celebrities are able to shape and stage, that is, perform, a sense of compassion for “a cause” on behalf of the largely passive audience. “Celanthropists,” as Rojek names them, act as mediators of people’s emotions and offer the viewers three important features: catharsis through a celebrity’s public endorsement of a good cause; emotionalism, which is a sense of indignation caused by the official agencies not doing their job properly; and exhibitionism, which the author describes as public displays of passion concerning a particular cause (Rojek 2013, p. 135). These features work together in a heavily mediated environment, where they can be further spread and replayed by the audiences. However, as Kapoor emphasizes in his book, aptly titled Celebrity Humanitarianism, it is difficult not to notice that this charity-focused activity benefits the celebrities and the corporate sponsors involved.
Thus, given the widespread criticisms of the celebritization of charity , the fact that Owsiak’s Woodstock Station music festival is promoted simply as a thank you for the volunteers who take part in the winter charity drive, looks particularly modest in comparison.
The Growth of Woodstock Station Festival and of Its Critics
Despite Owsiak’s success in promoting the ideas of peace, respect, and music in his shows and charity drives, the first Woodstock Station was a challenge. The audience proved that, for them, the festival’s message was not so much about peace and American hippies from the 1960s as about the 1980s Polish punk culture and defiance of order. The first festival took place in 1995 in Czymanowo, a small town close to the Baltic Sea, with around 30,000 people in the audience.Footnote 16 Many of the bands invited to perform had previously played in Jarocin, attracting a similar crowd to Owsiak’s event. As a result, Woodstock Station became a site of violence well known from Jarocin. The event in Czymanowo attracted an aggressive music audience, orphaned after the cancellation of the punk festival, and fights in the audience as well as stones thrown on the stage were not an uncommon sight. In addition, the alcohol ban Owsiak introduced proved ineffective, since locals sold cheap beer and vodka right outside the marked festival space. Discouraged, Owsiak threatened that he would not organize the festival next year if the violence did not stop. The warning worked, because the attendees wanted a music festival more than a fight. Yet it was also Owsiak’s charisma that convinced the crowd to refrain from aggression, an element that would prove key to the success of both the festival and the charity drive. Nevertheless, in order to discourage the uncontrollable punk audience from attending, punk rock bands were not invited to the subsequent editions of the festival. At the same time, the alcohol ban was lifted, since Owsiak figured the crowd would be more manageable if people drank legal beer instead of sneaking in illegal moonshine. After changing locations, in 2004 Woodstock Station moved to a field close to Kostrzyn nad Odrą, a town in Western Poland with about 18,000 inhabitants. In comparison, already in 2001 the audience of the festival reached over 100,000, and the close proximity to Germany has been attracting audiences from across the border. The festival space is a former military training ground—an irony in itself, given the festival’s roots—which offers well over 300 acres of open space surrounded by a forest. Audience attendance at the festival in Kostrzyn reached a record high in 2011, when 700,000 people came to Woodstock Station lured by The Prodigy, a British electronic group that had been most famous in the late 1990s, which served as the festival’s main act. Yet even the less star-filled recent editions gathered hundreds of thousands of people.
Since 1995, Woodstock Station has become a permanent feature in the Polish summer festival calendar, drawing increasing crowds of people, even though other festivals in Poland usually show more current or famous bands. Unlike other music events, Woodstock Station is free, and most importantly, because of its links with the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity , it offers an atmosphere of a caring community , unseen at other music festivals. The heart-shaped logo of the charity organization is visible everywhere at the festival, including the stages, service trucks, booth tents, and T-shirts worn by the attendees. One can also sense that the ambiance is greater than music alone. People I interviewed there emphasized the connection between the music festival and the charity drive, openly stating “I love the Grand Orchestra,” whether they were students in their early twenties from central Poland, drunk punks in their forties from a nearby town, or families from Kostrzyn, who came to the festival with small children in strollers.
Nevertheless, Woodstock Station has many critics. As the festival got bigger, it raised questions about funding. Some people, particularly conservative supporters of the Polish Catholic Church who saw Owsiak’s organization as a competitor rather than as an indicator of increased participation in charity activity in Poland, suspected the money was taken away from the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity . Despite reports issued by the organization that show that funds are taken only from the charity’s interests, critics remain unconvinced. On the one hand, some argue that they are jealous of Owsiak’s popularity (Skarżyńska 2012), but on the other hand, people are largely distrustful of anyone who has access to public money, as cases of corruption are not uncommon.Footnote 17 Conservative journalists discourage people from donating money to the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity ; according to them, it gives donors permission to not engage in charity apart from the winter drives.Footnote 18 In addition, they oppose Woodstock Station under the premise that it is a seedbed for sinful and unlawful behavior. Others voice their accusations of fraud on internet forums and in comments under online articles concerning Owsiak . Another often-raised controversy relates to Woodstock Station’s alleged promotion of sex, drugs, and alcohol, as well as Owsiak’s motto from his television-hosting days, “Róbta co chceta” (“Do Watcha Wanna”), which his critics interpret as sanctioning hedonism. Even though Owsiak is known for his negative stance toward drugs, the typical image of a music festival as a site of sex, drugs, and rock and roll still prevails. Indeed, there are places on-site where one can easily smell marijuana, but on the whole, the Woodstock Station festivalgoers get drunk rather than drugged. Another related accusation concerns the promotion of Satanism, an often-heard claim made by people who consider themselves deeply Catholic and who associate rock festivals with Ozzy Osbourne-like behavior.Footnote 19 Such opinions have been voiced numerous times on Radio Maryja and the television station TV Trwam , both radically conservative and xenophobic media owned by a Catholic priest, Tadeusz Rydzyk , particularly influential among older people in the Polish province . In 2004, TV Trwam aired a program wherein the festival was blamed for encouraging the consumption of alcohol and drugs, and for promoting Satanism. Owsiak took the station to court, and the radio was ordered to publicly apologize (PAP 2006). Over a decade later, it has still not complied with the court sentence.
Another accusation is that Owsiak uses Woodstock Station and the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity either to make personal profit or to promote himself. While he does not get paid for his work in the non-profit organization,Footnote 20 his media presence is a more complex issue. On the one hand, Owsiak argues that in order to get sponsors he has to put his face on their posters to promote the events they help fund. On the other, following Rojek’s argument on “Celanthropists,” because of the values Owsiak promotes and because of his visibility , young people consider Owsiak a person whose opinion they respect.Footnote 21 The combination of Owsiak’s self-promotion and considerable authority, especially among youth, creates a powerful mixture that draws people into taking part in the charity and the music festival, while deepening the reservations of others, jealous of Owsiak’s influence. One can argue that the criticisms are a form of appreciation for his achievements, which conservative and Catholic authorities wish for themselves. Moreover, despite the atmosphere of general distrustfulness in Poland,Footnote 22 these oft-voiced objections do not manage to tarnish the good reputation of Owsiak’s events. This can be interpreted as a success of both Owsiak and the many people who continuously engage in the activities he promotes. As regards Taylor’s proposition—that the social imaginary is based on the mutual relationship between social practice and understanding—people engage in acts of kindness and recognition because they see them as positive values. Nevertheless, in this case, their understanding of the society they are part of is based on widespread distrust. This means that, in a way, in their acts of kindness they remain “alone together,” and it is the winter drive and the summer festival that—unlike other charity events—make the social character of these practices of kindness visible.
The Festival Space: Commerce and Community
Following in the footsteps of American Woodstock and Jarocin, Woodstock Station was designed as an open-air event close to nature. The space in Kostrzyn is a green meadow the size of over 200 soccer fields surrounded by a forest. The small town is roughly 1.5 miles away from the festival site, and the location of Woodstock Station is close to the train station, making it accessible to people without cars. Because the vast majority of the festivalgoers use the railway to get to the event, special train cars are added each year. In addition, the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity provides moderately priced buses from major Polish cities,Footnote 23 and carpooling has become increasingly popular since the aughts. Those who to get to the festival by car usually come a day or two before its start in order to find a parking space on the field (there is no parking lot) and put up their tents close by.Footnote 24 Although, at first, the festival space appears chaotic and messy, it is organized to make it feel both open and safe. The main paths to the site are kept clear so that they can be used immediately in case of emergency. The festival site is marked by a tall, light, and portable metal fence that serves more as a sign than an obstacle. Upon entering, on the right side of the main path, one notices a huge stage raised 16 feet above the ground, over 50 feet tall and 200 feet wide; it dominates the vast festival area. Save for the empty space in front of the stage, the rest of the somewhat-hilly area is filled by a mass of tents, creating an almost favela-like landscape. One of the first things one notices after entering the festival space is a field hospital tent by the entrance and a “mushroom” close to the front of the stage—a water sprinkler that makes a muddy bath for people to play in, evoking the images from the 1969 Woodstock festival . Crowds of people can also be found waiting in line to bungee jump from a tall crane nearby. Some do somersaults in the air, others jump in pairs, holding each other tightly. In general, people present there make the event feel lighthearted; in this, it is quite similar to the atmosphere of the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity drives in the winter.
Close to the stage are also ATMs of one of the event’s sponsors, the Polish bank Pekao SA (in 2017, it was the private bank mBank, since companies owned by the state—such as Pekao SA—have been withdrawing from partnerships with the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity and Woodstock Station since the 2015 victory of the Law and Justice party), and a small press center building that is usually packed with reporters editing material. Most of them are Polish, usually from local and regional radio stations, but journalists from Germany and Spain are not an uncommon sight. Further down the path are the enormous tents of other main sponsors: Allegro , Poland’s largest online auction site, and Carlsberg, an international beer brand (it has since been replaced by a different beer brand, Lech). As a playful twist on environmental awareness, Allegro offers several free-of-charge human-powered electricity charging stations, which are customized bicycles with tens of sockets. The line to ride these bikes is usually at least an hour long, but people calmly wait for their turn to charge their phones. Another line in the tent is formed by people waiting to take part in a water pumping competition: using a man-powered mechanism that looks like a set of seesaws, they pump water for the festival sanitation system. (During the most recent edition of the festival, Allegro added a Ferris wheel and photo booths, among others.) At the same time, they compete to break the record for the amount of water pumped during the three days of the festival (as it were, a new record was made at Woodstock Station in 2013). The beer bar tents are arranged in a U-shape, with thinned-out grass, plastic benches, and bar tables, providing a vast open space inside that can easily fit a couple thousand people. All around the festival, one can notice people carrying six-packs of beer in plastic glasses, sold for three zlotys (less than one dollar) per half a quart, which is half the regular market price. The carton beer holders can be unfolded and people use them as mats to sit on the dusty ground. Many people at the festival can be also seen with the brand’s metal dog tags dangling on their chests, which are handed out as souvenirs together with a beer purchase.
Play, a mobile service provider and another big sponsor of the festival, hands out logoed freebies—small fabric tubes in white and purple stripes, the company’s colors. The festivalgoers style the snoods as hats, scarves, and arm warmers. However, the house and electronic music one can hear in the company’s tent lends an entirely different, club-like atmosphere to the otherwise rock-and-roll space. Even though Play provides much-sought-after phone-charging stations there, the place—enough to fit a couple thousand people—is significantly less crowded than the other spaces at the festival. A possible reason for this may be the music blasting from the speakers, which, according to the Woodstock attendees I talked to, clashes with the event. The sound creates a very different ambiance from the rest of Woodstock Station, urban and electronic, better fit for an underground club than an open space in the middle of nature, as one of my interviewees put it while charging his phone there. When I asked a group of people in the tent why it was so empty, they shrugged their shoulders at first, but then answered that they expected “more of a rock and live-instrument vibe than Open’er,” the latter a major commercial summer music festival held in Gdynia, a big city on the Polish coast. On the one hand, this failed choice of music at the Play tent shows a misreading of the festivalgoers’ tastes. On the other, however, it may suggest that at Woodstock Station, attendees reject music they feel is better suited for more urban and affluent environments. A festival that is widely celebrated by youth from the province is also a place for them to exercise power to dismiss sounds that bring to mind music events—and the money—the attendees may not have.
Audience and Mutual Responsibility
The festivalgoers are mostly in their late teens and early twenties, but it is not hard to find people in their fifties as well as families with small children, “the second generation of Woodstock Station participants,” as they often describe themselves. People are colorfully dressed in T-shirts with pants or shorts, although one can also notice women in bright dresses or bikini tops matched with shorts, while some men walk around bare-chested. The usual choice of shoes is combat boots or sandals, and everyone is slightly dirty from the ubiquitous dust. Many people wear accessories made on the spot, such as strange-looking hats made of the purple and white snoods given out by one of the sponsors, jewelry made out of beer cans, or inscriptions and drawings in marker pen on their arms and chests. Some wear punk-style mohawks, while others put colorful pins in their hair. One can also find people dressed in black T-shirts with names of the rock, punk , or metal bands they like—a typical sight at music concerts. While the audience comes to Woodstock Station from all over the country, people from small towns are particularly noticeable: they often camp together and plant colorful, handmade banners with the names of their hometowns, marking their space. The signs are quite helpful as they serve as guideposts for people trying to find their own tents. Many of these banners are decorated with drawings of flowers, as well as peace and anarchy signs—a mix of symbols typically associated with Woodstock and Jarocin festivals . Others bear humorous captions, such as “Mom, I’m Alive” (Owsiak , himself a father of two, likes to remind the audience from the stage that they should call their parents). Locals from the town of Kostrzyn, too, come to the festival. The older town residents can be easily found in the crowd because of their less-colorful, and cleaner, everyday clothes. Residents attending the festival say they are proud that Woodstock Station is hosted there. One of the older Kostrzyn locals—over 60 years old—I asked about the festival said, “It’s good for the youth to have a place to have fun.” The generally positive attitude of the locals is a particularly striking contrast to the image of Woodstock Station shown in the major media: a mass of half-naked people playing in mud, getting drunk, drugged, and having sex. While this scandalous picture of intoxicated beasts driven by basic desires conforms to a stereotypical vision of rock festival depravity, and reminds of the festival in Jarocin, in the case of Woodstock Station, the actual event proves far less spectacular and much more civil.
The vast majority of the audience is Polish, though one can also hear other languages in the crowd. Germans, particularly from towns from the neighboring former German Democratic Republic, have become frequent visitors after the festival moved close to the western border at the end of the 1990s. Other easily noticeable foreign audience members include Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians.Footnote 25 Ukrainians, who are also visible at Woodstock Station, were present in 2012 not only to participate in the event, but also to promote their own charity which was inspired by Owsiak . Dressed in the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag, they handed out flyers and offered information about their own charity organization, Heart to Heart. The charity is a Ukrainian take on the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity , an adaptation they are particularly proud of. The Ukrainians in attendance I talked to believe that, unlike other established charities from Western Europe or the United States, the Polish organization is a success story that can be replicated in their country: Owsiak’s organization’s ostensibly chaotic rock-and-roll vibe can resonate among their own audiences, because they, too, share pro-democratic rock music heritage.Footnote 26
Charity: Eastern Trust Versus Western Institutionalization
According to Owsiak , such adaptations of ideas for charity as the Ukrainian Heart to Heart are rare. In my interview, he emphasized that charity organizations in Western Europe are reluctant to share information on ways of reaching audiences, because they find the seemingly disorganized style adopted by the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity inferior to their own and, in essence, irresponsible. Yet at the same time, these Western charities are unable to understand the unceasing popularity of Owsiak’s drives. The stark contrast in attitudes toward cooperation within West and East European charities suggests a deeper divide in the approach to charity: between that based on trust shared by individuals, as exemplified by the Grand Orchestra’s tin cans, which are easy targets for thieves, and that based on the safety of donations, as illustrated by German charity institutions, which only accept credit cards (Dobroczyński and Owsiak 1999, p. 132). It also points to a fundamental difference in trust—mentioned by Nowak (1981) in relation to values—between societies with Communist heritage, suspicious of official institutions and relying on individual relations instead, and Western societies with long-established trust in their institutions. Starting from the late 1950s, for over two decades, the Polish sociologist analyzed the values of Poles in Communist Poland, and he observed a continuing fissure he named a “sociological void” between people’s values: while they placed importance on their family, friends, and the Polish nation, they remained indifferent to the state. The Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity, on the one hand, encourages individuals to help others, and in this sense ignores the state. On the other hand, however, the drive illustrates a departure from Nowak’s “sociological void,” since its organization and wide visibility became possible because of Poland’s democratic transition, and because the January “finale” is broadcast live on a major television channel—until recently it was TVP 2, one of the main public television channels; however, in 2017 TVP 2 refused to air the transmission, and the live show was moved to the public station’s major private-owned competitor, TVN. According to Owsiak , charities in Western Europe are far more institutionalized, professionalized, and often detached from their donors, whose role is limited to providing credit card numbers or performing well-defined volunteer tasks. In Poland, however, winter drives are nationwide events that shape a sense of community by merging local activity with national media coverage, making them countrywide celebrations of care and sympathy toward others. In this sense, the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity is not just a charity and Woodstock Station is not just a music festival, because they both serve as a vehicle that allows people to easily feel they are helping others. By participating they can also openly show their pride in this new democratic Poland, where such activity is not only possible, but publicly supported and heavily advertised in major media. Because of Communist heritage, Polish society is less affluent and charity activity is less widespread than in Western European countries; thus, visible acts of charity demonstrate a particularly strong, positive social meaning in Poland. Furthermore, the popularity of Owsiak’s events challenge existing research on Polish attitudes, according to which self-centeredness is extended to family and friends while limiting one’s horizon of care for others, confirming Nowak’s observation made during the Communist era.Footnote 27 In addition, Owsiak’s events are unique in that they provide visibility to people by acknowledging their charitable acts, both by providing live reports on the raised funds and by organizing an entire festival to thank people for taking part in the drive. The Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity and Woodstock Station show people as members of a bigger community —of kindness, caring, and mutual recognition—and make them feel as such by openly celebrating the virtue of helping.
Music and Community: You Get What You (Don’t) Pay For
Artists who perform at Woodstock Station are either directly invited by the organizers or selected based on demos they submit. The festival has its own annual award, the Golden Spinning Top (Złoty Bączek), which is given to the artist chosen by the audience. However, unlike other big, ticketed festivals in Poland, bands that perform at Woodstock Station are usually hardly known or past their prime. The genres, in the spirit of the original Woodstock, are mostly rock, folk, and ethnic music, but more contemporary heavy rock and industrial music can also be heard. Even Owsiak’s artist friends who perform at Woodstock Station—such as Muniek Staszczyk, leader of the popular pop-rock band T. Love—acknowledge that the festival is Owsiak’s “private” event which is not particularly open to new trends in music. Furthermore, bands that perform there are rarely offered more than an opportunity to play in front of the enormous audience, since Woodstock Station does not pay artists who play there. Only the biggest stars are offered accommodation in a hotel located closer to the town, others have to put up their tents in the same space as the audience. As a result, some of the bands that play at other major Polish festivals perform at Woodstock Station just for the thrill of performing in front of an audience not found elsewhere, or do so on account of the values Owsiak stands for, while others find the experience itself is not enough.Footnote 28 Even though the majority of leading Polish rock artists have played at Woodstock Station since its launch in 1995 (and some more than once), both critics and supporters of the event argue that the result of the “free-of-charge festival” policy, which applies both to the audience and to the artists, makes the event more provincial than it could be.
Owsiak, however , claims he puts emphasis elsewhere. Woodstock Station is not a commercial festival showcasing the newest music and biggest bands, but is rather a music event created to celebrate people being together. In this sense, the music at the festival becomes secondary to having a common experience in a shared time and space. “The music is great, but look at these awesome people!” an 18-year-old girl dressed in a colorful bikini top and denim shorts told me, echoing an opinion voiced by many other attendees. The audience members I interviewed often stressed that what they find most important about Woodstock Station is that it is a place where a community is formed around the positive values Owsiak embodies. “We’re here because it’s about peace, and love, and music” was a common statement made by teens and twentysomethings; but even the more reserved locals—frequently older than most of the attendees—who came to see the festival only for a couple of hours said that “Owsiak is doing something good for young people.”Footnote 29 The people I talked to mentioned “a unique experience” of freedom, peace, and being there with others. For example, one of my interviewees, in his late twenties, said, “You feel good there. Imagine seven hundred thousand people. And Jurek [Owsiak ] says, ‘Hey, sit down for a second,’ and everyone sits down. (…) Woodstock is certainly not clean. Seven hundred thousand people jump and dust fills the air. It’s unique, it’s one of a kind. (…) Woodstock is free. It doesn’t cost anything to be there, but it’s a question of people’s mentality. (…) The atmosphere at Woodstock is ‘no rules,’ and it’s exceptional. There are no fights, there are no brawls.” Although he calls himself a fan of electronic rather than rock music , he comes to Woodstock for the “atmosphere” he can only find there. The artists who perform at Woodstock Station share this view. For example, Katarzyna Nosowska,Footnote 30 one of the most popular and respected contemporary Polish pop musicians, states aptly:
We are all aware that there is a stereotype of young people favored by the media, by newspapers and glossies. These are not such people, and I believe this is where their strength lies. They are truly independent humans who, likely, guarantee that certain ideals will carry on. (…) This audience is not shown on television , it is not discussed on the radio, it is not written about in the press, and it is its great value. (…) [Pop festivals] look cool on television , people cheer and everything is great, but my hunch is that a whole range of artists (…) will never experience what takes place here. Likewise, the audience of pop festivals will never experience this kind of adrenaline, this kind of unity that can be sensed all around this place . (Owsiak and Skaradziński 2010, p. 187)
At Woodstock Station, music provides context for a celebration under the banners of peace, love, music, associated with hippie and rock culture, and of the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity’s kindness to others. While neither these ideas nor their festival context are new, they reemerged in post-1989 Poland as a mass celebration of freedom and access to the outside world. If one considers it a form of “catching up” with the West , it is a fresh interpretation of the American hippie ideals of the 1960s mixed with Poland’s own heritage of 1980s punk-rock protest against oppression, presented in a still newly democratic, transforming society. Woodstock Station reintroduces the two festival traditions and adds its own: that of a uniquely Polish, contemporary charity event based on trust and particularly practiced care about others. The festival is a gathering intended for people who share these principles. In fact, a number of the people I talked to at the festival came to Woodstock Station despite the music, but for “the atmosphere.” They emphasized that the shared feeling of a cheerful, loud community—of recognition and kindness—makes the festival such a popular event. The uniqueness of this music festival lies in that it is more than just about music. Rather, it is a space where people can celebrate the values Owsiak promotes, by constantly engaging in small gestures of recognition, as Erving Goffman (1959) would put it: from smiles and giving a hand when someone wants to stand up from the dusty ground, to offering free beer and letting strangers skip the 30-minute-long line to the public showers because they said they would only need a minute to brush their teeth (and, as it turned out, they did).
Woodstock Station’s distinctive mode of operation has, however, led to various misunderstandings in the past. This occurred most notably in 2011, when The Prodigy headlined the event. An international chart-topper from the end of the 1990s, the band forced the organizers to install metal barriers between the stage and the audience. It was a thing unheard of at the festival, known for its well-behaved attendees. Still, safety was also an effect of an ingenious organization of space: because the stage is over 16 feet tall, it forces people to move back in order to see the performers. Consequently, the space in front of the stage—which the band demanded to be fenced-off—is fairly empty, allowing people to move easily from one side to the other. Nonetheless, the band’s management claimed the barrier was necessary for safety reasons, arguing that if someone in the audience standing close to the barrier fainted, the security could pick that person up easily and provide help in the vacated space. Although Owsiak disagreed, the barriers were finally put up for The Prodigy concert, which attracted 700,000 people. Afterwards, however, Owsiak stated he would never invite artists of this scale again, choosing accessible open space in front of the stage over big stars.
The disagreement concerning security provides an interesting example of the differences between what Owsiak labeled “Western-style organization” based on barriers and regulations, and his own idea of designing space to encourage certain types of behavior, visibly exhibiting trust to the festival’s attendees. Save for The Prodigy’s headlining year, his barrier-less approach has been effective in maintaining order. Even more importantly, this approach has been successful in empowering attendees by extending to them an expectation of mutual responsibility. At other events of this size, the vast audience space in front of the stage would typically be cut into sections using fences and checkpoints. At Woodstock Station, however, the section-less audience setup compels people to keep watch on their neighbors. This particular example shows that giving people seemingly too much freedom, and making them aware of it, may result not in disorder but in shared responsibility. In fact, Owsiak emphasizes that Woodstock Station is free of charge precisely to make people feel they are the co-owners of the event. A thing he finds particularly important is what can be called a community of responsibility: a shared sense of obligation to support a common good that emerges, simply, in participation—yet it is a very different approach to participation than that described in the context of Live 8 by Street, Hague, and Savigny (2008). “Masses of volunteers run to help,” Owsiak says, “because they want to feel useful. This is also the case of Woodstock Station, where people say ‘We make it happen.’” According to the festival’s creator, this sense of shared responsibility and agency becomes the source of empowerment that, further, makes meaningful discussion possible: “People feel that even their individual behavior inside the tents affects Woodstock Station as a whole, ‘we feel good together, we feel we create it, and we are praised for it.’” “All this,” Owsiak adds, “contributes to the idea of ‘we’re doing this festival together.’” In this sense, Owsiak’s claim that the audience at Woodstock Station is the main feature of the festival becomes particularly clear. During the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity drive, participants make themselves visible by wearing heart-shaped stickers. At Woodstock Station, they form the picturesque crowd of several hundred thousand, an image often shown in the media. But what is rarely mentioned is that with few barriers and few restrictions the Woodstock Station audience makes it one of the safest festivals in Poland.Footnote 31
Still, order is not left to the audience alone. The Peace Patrol, a staff of roughly 1,000 specially trained volunteers, is responsible for order at Woodstock Station as well. As with other elements of the festival, the idea for the Peace Patrol was also inspired by the American Woodstock Owsiak saw in 1994. Used to aggressive guards in Poland, he was impressed by their American counterparts’ friendliness and effective organization of work, and—as he said in the interview—decided early on to adopt this idea at Woodstock Station. In Owsiak’s version, however, members of the Peace Patrol do not limit their participation to volunteer work at the festival: during the school year, they often take part in other activities of the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity , such as administrative work for the organization, and fundraising during winter drives. Additionally, Peace Patrol members organize first-aid workshops for students at schools.Footnote 32 Although the Peace Patrol cooperates with the so-called Blue Patrol, a group of proper bodyguards dressed in characteristic Woodstock Station blue T-shirts—hence their name—as well as the police, the Peace Patrol is the most noticeable display of security at the event. What’s more, the visibility of the volunteer Peace Patrol, whose members wear T-shirts in either red (regular members) or yellow (section leaders), serves to strengthen the notion of an egalitarian event, where order is maintained not by an outside force, but thanks to an agreement within a community of equals.
The Missing Audience
The festival’s attendees mockingly describe people who do not come to Woodstock Station as “Open’er lovers from big cities,” and indeed, audiences from major Polish urban centers are far less noticeable than the ones from small towns. Open’er festival, mentioned by several people I interviewed to emphasize the uniqueness of Woodstock Station, was the first Polish music festival that began inviting current, fashionable bands from all over the world. It was launched in 2002 in Gdynia, a big city on the Polish coast. Unlike Woodstock Station, Open’er is commercial, and by Polish standards the tickets are not cheap, priced at about 580 zlotys (168 dollars) for the four-day event, plus 125 zlotys (36 dollars) for camping. The concerts present contemporary and experimental international rock and pop, competing with acclaimed music festivals in Europe such as the Danish Roskilde or British Glastonbury, and with audiences reaching over 100,000 attendees. As Owsiak and the Woodstock Station festivalgoers I talked to admitted, most of the festival’s audience would not be able to afford to pay for Open’er or any other major Polish commercial music festivals. At the same time, people who go to festivals to see the latest bands are usually not attracted by Woodstock Station’s choice of artists. In addition, the festival’s very basic and scarce amenities, such as toilets and showers, do little to appeal to people unconvinced by the musical component of the festival. They are uninterested, or unaware, of its key feature, the community experience—as a recent Woodstock Station “convert” (a term he used to describe himself) in his early thirties with a well-paying corporate job, from Poland’s capital, emphasized.Footnote 33 These two different festival audiences suggest a larger divide between affluent people from large cities who can afford to pay for the latest music and those with less financial means who come to Woodstock Station from provincial Poland. This rift has consequences not only in terms of access to music, but also to community: although the less-affluent audience is limited by Owsiak’s choice of music, the more affluent festivalgoers who ignore Woodstock Station miss what is considered to be the most important element of the free festival: the sense of being a part of a community. For those who do attend, it is a music event that celebrates people’s kindness in a free society, where helping others does not have to be a sign of protest against an oppressive state (or even an openly hostile government, which has been the case since 2015) but, simply, a practice of mutual respect.
Still, people from big urban centers are not the only ones who overlook the festival. Despite its size, Woodstock Station is also largely ignored by the mainstream media. One possible reason is that, unlike the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity , the youth-oriented festival is not perceived as a national event in which everyone is encouraged to participate. It is also probable that major media disregard Woodstock Station because of its complexity.Footnote 34 On the surface, it is simply a big event with unfashionable bands, popular among young provincial Poles, who are either unaware of the newest music trends or unable to pay for them. In contrast, festivals such as Open’er appear trendier, tidier, and ostensibly better organized. They are seen as more Western European, representing the prosperity, high quality, and order associated with established democratic and capitalist societies. Yet the recognition and kindness toward strangers that Woodstock Station is praised for by its audience is—paradoxically—also a key feature of Western European civil society. Thus, in this sense, Woodstock Station is perhaps more “Western” than Open’er: while the commercial event is a showcase of affluence associated with the West , Owsiak’s festival embodies “habits of the heart,” a fundamental component of Western democracies , emphasized already by Tocqueville.Footnote 35
Negotiating Community in Tents: The Police, Catholic Jesus Station, and the Academy of Exceptionally Beautiful Arts
Unlike most music festivals, Woodstock Station provides vast space for numerous organizations that engage in activities expanding the festival’s motto of music , peace, and friendship, and have become an inherent part of the event.Footnote 36 Over 20 non-governmental organizations as well as state institutions set up their booths at Woodstock Station, but the festival has become particularly famous for including the Catholic Jesus Station and for creating its own discussion space, the Academy of Exceptionally Beautiful Arts.Footnote 37 Here I focus on the organizations whose spaces were most visited by the festival attendees or which have been the most visible in the Polish media.
The flat area where most of the festival facilities—including the main stage, shops, as well as food and sponsor tents—are located is separated from the hills crowded with people’s tents by a road, part dirt and part asphalt. Because of the heavy pedestrian traffic, the pathway is called “Marszałkowska,” named after a central street in Poland’s capital. Small stands that sell T-shirts, sunglasses, and wooden jewelry, as well as one of the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity booths with themed clothing, books, records, and stationery, are located on one side of the road, while the other side is mostly occupied by well-known non-governmental organizations, such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the Polish Independent Student Union, Monar Foundation, which helps drug and alcohol addicts, and the Never Again Foundation (“Nigdy Więcej”), which organizes soccer matches with players coming from different minorities and ethnic groups.Footnote 38 Interestingly, state institutions, notably the police, which rarely focus on communicating with average citizens, also find Woodstock Station an attractive space to promote their activities. Because of their presence, the festival expands into an inclusive event not only for individuals and non-governmental organizations, but also for key state institutions that, briefly put, organize society as a whole. The police put up a blue-colored tent, its official color, offering information about their work, laws on drugs and alcohol, behavior in public spaces, and other regulations they think the festival audience may be interested in. Indeed, their tent is popular among the curious festivalgoers, who get the rare opportunity to talk with the police officers about their work, rather than being stopped by them on the street. The police officials at Woodstock Station are, usually unlike elsewhere, open and friendly. A discussion I heard there, which began with a question often posed by young people—“Why can’t I drink alcohol in the park?”—ended in both sides agreeing that alcohol abuse among Poles is a serious social problem that needs to be dealt with, even if not every single person who drinks outside poses a threat to others.Footnote 39 Law enforcement is one of the forms of tackling the issue. Although the police is not infrequently both feared and distrusted by Poles,Footnote 40 inside the tent many of the conversations about fighting crime and maintaining order ended with the festival attendees saying, “I respect you” (rather than the far more common “Fuck the police”) in response to the officers’ arguments, or, perhaps, to their unbureaucratic approach, rarely found among members of the police. In this sense, the music event provided an otherwise unusual opportunity for citizens and representatives of state power to see and talk to each other as members of the same community.
The presence of state institutions at the festival may seem unusual at first. When young people have contact with the police, it is more often than not because they are being given warnings or fines for minor offences, such as illegal drinking in public spaces, loud behavior at night, or biking on the sidewalk.Footnote 41 However, the very possibility of talking to authorities as human beings, as opposed to officials, in a space where people feel safe, allows both sides to communicate on a more equal footing—people are not limited to typical roles of law-breaking citizens on the one hand, and disciplinarian enforcers of the law on the other. Secondly, state institutions such as the police, associated with restrictions and legal violence, gain legitimacy by being present at Woodstock Station on the same terms as others. The popularity of the police tent—standing next to those of non-governmental organizations—suggests that people are interested in understanding the state as an organizer of Polish society. The festivalgoers engage in these conversations to ask how state institutions work for them as citizens, and how they help (or harm) strengthen a democratic community. The discussions thus offer yet another example of bridging the “sociological void” in values between people and the state. Given that the latter was viewed as an enemy less than 30 years ago, the courteous exchanges of opinions between two former opponents can be considered a significant achievement of the Polish post-1989 society.
Jesus Station or Being a Good Person Outside the Church
Another major institution present at Woodstock Station is the Polish Catholic Church . Since Jesus Station (Przystanek Jezus) was initially launched as a music festival in 1999 in opposition to Owsiak’s festival, it has become one of the most talked about and controversial features of Woodstock Station, and has been the object of heated debates in the major media. Jesus Station emerged as an event in open competition with Owsiak’s festival, which it accused of promoting sex, drugs, and ungodly behavior. Despite the fact that Owsiak had been campaigning against drugs from the initial launch of Woodstock Station and that, in comparison with other such events, cases of alcohol or drug intoxication have been relatively rare, major media outlets have been focusing on reporting the stereotypical “rock-and-roll behavior” known from other rock festivals, and the Church used this argument to strengthen its own negative stance toward Woodstock Station. Still, there was also a tacit agreement among the Church hierarchs that the religious institution felt threatened by Owsiak’s success. In the first place, he was the face of a major charity that challenged the Church’s dominant role in promoting empathy, framing charity as a secular institution. Furthermore, while since the 1990s the Church has been popularly viewed as an institution fighting cultural wars over sex—loudly condemning not only abortion, but also condoms, birth control, and, most currently, in vitro fertilization—Owsiak has become a major authority for young people, because he cared less about admonishing them for their sins and more about how they could do something for others while enjoying themselves at the same time. Thus, Jesus Station was created as the Church’s answer to Owsiak’s success, an attempt to use the large music festival as an opportunity to make itself visible among the young audience it had failed to reach as successfully as Owsiak.
Located next to Owsiak’s Woodstock Station, Jesus Station was built in 1999 by St. Timothy’s congregation, located close to Żary, where Woodstock Station was held at the time. The mission of the far smaller festivalFootnote 42 is to proselytize, provide discussions on Catholicism, and pray. However, in 1998, Owsiak asked the Church hierarchs if they would be interested in holding a Holy Mass for the Woodstock Station audience, but the offer was declined on the grounds that the rock music festival was not a place for Catholic worship. Nevertheless, even though the relations between the two events began with conflict, after some time the two sides managed to overcome the initial hostilities, and Jesus Station was incorporated into Owsiak’s main festival. There the Church representatives slowly began to learn how to communicate with young people using their own language, talking rather than scolding them for questioning the principles of the religious institution, which they found disconnected from the present. Despite the religious institution’s significant influence on public life in Poland, according to recent studies, Poles are increasingly disappointed with the Catholic Church , which they find prejudiced, unwilling to change its dogmatic approach toward issues such as contraception, divorce, and homosexuality, or to fight pedophilia within the institution itself.Footnote 43 The people I talked to inside Jesus Station stressed their frustration with the religious institution, which they thought did not focus on the key issue of being a “good person.” I listened to several discussions held in small groups of no more than eight people, including one or two young-looking priests (interestingly, the nuns who were there only rarely engaged in conversations with the festivalgoers). Woodstock Station attendees asked questions such as “Why does the Church hate homosexuals?” and “Why do you think I am evil?” but also “What would Jesus think about weed?” The responses of the priests usually centered around Catholicism being a responsibility and a practice of restraint in a “permissive reality” in which nothing is forbidden. A question particularly fitting to the context of Woodstock Station was asked in a somewhat aggressive tone by a girl in her late teens, who clearly wanted to anger the priests: “What if I’m a good person but I don’t believe in God?” The priest answered quickly, perhaps prepared for this type of challenge, “If you are a good person, God will come to you.”
It took the organizers of Jesus Station a couple of years to change their openly hostile approach toward the “godless” audience. In fact, the Catholic festival was expelled from the official site in 2003, after the priests set up tents with visible logos of the xenophobic “Radio Maryja” and fenced Jesus Station off from the surrounding space. The increasingly negative comments made by the members of Jesus Station about Woodstock Station’s audience, such as “I saw those devilish glances cast in our direction” (Owsiak and Skaradziński 2010, p. 105), which were voiced at the festival and on the internet , did not help to overcome the conflict. The current peaceful coexistence of the two events—Jesus Station was reinvited to Woodstock Station after a year-long ban—serves as an otherwise rare example of overcoming, or at least lessening, ideological conflict on whether the Church has a monopoly over defining moral behavior. Instead, what takes place at Jesus Station is an unusually open discussion between Church hierarchs and laypersons. It is one of the few instances where the Church attempts to talk rather than bully those who disagree with it. At the same time, it also suggests that the Catholic Church in Poland is capable of adopting a more welcoming approach toward people who question its power , in order to claim its role as an authority over Polish society as a whole.Footnote 44 During my research at Woodstock Station, the Catholic Church made attempts to emulate its popular host (and competitor) by showing Christian-themed films, such as Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of Christ,” next to a Polish documentary, titled “Spirit,” about people in different places around the globe finding faith in God, inviting musicians to perform Christian folk and rock music , and members of the clergy to give inspirational, yet often lackluster talks resembling typical Church sermons. Still, Jesus Station has become a regular feature at Woodstock Station, with priests and nuns offering presentations and prayers that are held under a 15-feet-tall white cross several times during the day. The space of Jesus Station is rarely empty, and Woodstock festivalgoers engage in conversations with the priests out of curiosity, for fun, and to talk about matters important to them. Nonetheless, conservative critics of Woodstock Station, which include not only Radio Maryja and TV Trwam, but also more widely known conservative journalists visible in the major media,Footnote 45 rarely come to the festival to witness the interaction firsthand. They broadly reject the principles of Owsiak’s rock music festival, regardless of the presence of Jesus Station or the favorable opinion of the local priest. Nevertheless, the shift in the Church’s attitude toward Woodstock Station points at Owsiak as a powerful rival to shaping people’s interpretations of what it means to be a good person—to the point that it forces the religious institution to reconsider its own way of approaching youth. This change is illustrated by Artur Godnarski, a priest and administrator of Jesus Station, who said in an interview that “Jesus would go to Woodstock Station.” (Godnarski and Ziółkowski 2012) In a tone rarely heard among Polish Catholic priests, he argued that the Church’s mission at the festival is not to sway the audience in favor of the Catholic Church but to inspire people to ask fundamental questions about life and God. Such liberal statements are not popular among the Polish Church hierarchy, and Godnarski acknowledged that not all fellow priests share his view.
When I conducted the research at Woodstock Station, Jesus Station was filled with young, good-looking priests who engaged in conversations with small groups of people about God and about more earthly troubles, such as communicating with parents or significant others. A priest hearing a young person’s confession was not an uncommon sight. Although unlike other events at Woodstock Station, the prayers held at Jesus Station several times a day were solemn and formal, people still came to take part in them. Their attendance could have been treated as a success of the Catholic Church in attracting people to the institution but, at the same time, showed its general difficulties in communicating with young people: they stressed that at Jesus Station the priests managed to not “scare” them away. “Finally, I can have a conversation with them,” explained a young man in his early twenties, dressed in a colorful T-shirt, combat knee-length shorts, and heavy boots. “Before, they would just look at you with suspicion, and go back to their own people.”Footnote 46 Thus, Jesus Station at Owsiak’s festival exposed an interesting paradox concerning the Polish Church and the young generation of Poles. The issue the Church had to confront was not the increasing secularism of young people, as many of them claimed they believed in God.Footnote 47 Rather, it was the inability of most of the priests to discuss personal questions about faith in an open-minded way, or to make it easier for the people who came to them to relate Catholic principles to their everyday moral choices.
While the conflict over Jesus Station made the Catholic Church the best known religious institution at Woodstock Station, it is not the only religious presence there. Another is the Hare Krishna movement, which has been a part of the festival almost from the beginning. Unlike the Catholic Church , Hare Krishna does not focus on religious discussion, and many of the Hare Krishna members present at the festival when I did my research were foreigners who did not speak Polish. Instead, they offered free yoga classes, chants, and low-priced Indian vegetarian food, very popular with the festival audience because of its affordability. According to Owsiak , these two religious organizations are equally present at the festival, but, not surprisingly, the festivalgoers I asked stated that Hare Krishna is much better “blended” into the festival. Two men in their early twenties I talked to at the Hare Krishna tent gave an interesting comparison to show the difference in the religious institutions’ approach to people at the festival: members of Hare Krishna sold warm meals, while priests at Jesus Station let people watch them eat soup during lunchtime since, as they claimed, they only had food for their own staff. According to the men at the Hare Krishna tent, if the priests sold low-priced food, the festival attendees would feel more welcome there.
The Hare Krishna daily marches with drums and chants down the main pathways are treated as one of the permanent features of Woodstock Station, and the religious movement, with its American Woodstock heritage, fits Owsiak’s festival particularly well. The Catholic priests, on the other hand, are perceived as somewhat alien. “They don’t like the people at Woodstock,” the two men at the Hare Krishna tent insisted. It is a paradox that despite the fact that 92% of Poles declare themselves Catholic, and most of the people I asked at Woodstock Station claimed they believe in God, at the festival the religious institution is treated as an out-of-place, and often hostile, minority. It may suggest that the ideas the Church stands for, and which are manifestly shared by people participating in Owsiak’s events, have been becoming increasingly disconnected since the launch of democratic transition. Owsiak’s events show that collective acts of kindness and the definition of good deeds are no longer reserved to the Church. At the same time, the many unfavorable opinions voiced by Church hierarchs accusing Owsiak of personal profit out of his charity imply that only the Catholic Church can be trusted to do charity work. The secular “Good Samaritans,” which the Woodstock Station audience embodies, pose competition to the Polish Church, reluctant to recognize that doing good is not only a religious virtue.
Academy of Exceptionally Beautiful Arts: Discussions on Public Life (and Religion)
One of the most interesting discussion spaces at the festival is located up on a hill. The Academy of Exceptionally Beautiful Arts is a tent with a stage and a wooden floor that can fit around 300 people. It has become famous for housing talks with politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and a variety of well-known and respected Polish and international figures. The idea for the Academy of Exceptionally Beautiful Arts came from Zbigniew Hołdys, a famous Polish rock musician who recorded his biggest hits in the 1980s. A friend of Owsiak , Hołdys wanted to create a welcoming space for discussion of open-minded people and, as Owsiak emphasized, the musician’s idea proved a success at Woodstock Station. The Academy of Exceptionally Beautiful Arts has also become known for its audience, which the guests often find notably more insightful than the lighthearted festival context would suggest.Footnote 48 The Academy is a particularly interesting space where one can observe people listening and discussing issues with respect for each other, even when the discussants differ in opinions, which is not typical behavior for large public forums in Poland. In addition, by connecting entertainment and serious discussion, the Academy creates a platform where grand concepts concerning Polish society can also meet as ideas for community. Thus, in its interpretation of Poland’s community, Woodstock Station goes further than the festivals it is inspired by. Instead of simply rejecting the state, as the festival’s pre-1989 predecessors did, Woodstock Station promotes discussion with representatives of institutions—politicians, members of the military, social activists, journalists—that shape and organize public life in contemporary Poland. The very possibility of such open debates as well as the willingness of people to participate in them is an illustration of Poland’s fundamental democratic transformation.
The Academy of Exceptionally Beautiful Arts presented a number of important discussions, which were later reported in the major Polish media, both press and television . For example, in 2012 the Academy hosted two heads of state: the president of Poland, Bronisław Komorowski , and the president of Germany, Joachim Gauck took part in a joint talk. The meeting was symbolic not only because the two states with a centuries-long history of conflict became friendly neighbors after the fall of Communism . Such an event would be unthinkable only two decades ago, before the memory of World War II atrocities, painfully remembered by Poles, slowly became replaced by economic and political cooperation of two democratic societies. The meeting of the two presidents was important as one of many indicators of Poland’s new, post-1989 outlook on the outside world. However, another influential, albeit very different, meeting—focused on Poland’s local, and more heated, issues—took place at the Academy of Exceptionally Beautiful Arts earlier. In 2007 Józef Życiński , a respected and popular archbishop known as a defender of Woodstock Station—a rarity among the Church hierarchs—participated in a talk there. This appearance led Życiński to be labeled a “liberal” by conservative priests and Catholic journalists (Morciniec 2013; Terlikowski 2013). His talk was particularly significant because he had rejected a similar offer made by Jesus Station that he received soon after Owsiak’s invitation. What’s more, Życiński’s presence at Woodstock Station gave the festival a new legitimacy of sorts: if the Archbishop came for a talk there, the event could not be all that ungodly. However, Życiński’s presence at the festival made a rift within the Polish Church itself more visible. Though he represented a liberal vision of the religious institution, open to discussion with people holding different opinions, at Jesus Station one could notice that the priests try to ignore the post-1989 “pluralistic situation” experienced daily by the festivalgoers: this includes issues such as the growing social approval of contraception and, to a lesser extent, homosexuality in Poland, which the Church hierarchs openly condemn. According to Życiński’s critics, the Catholic Church is supposed to be an institution that provides clear instructions on moral conduct, resisting the complexities of contemporary reality, yet actively enforcing religious principles through the Church’s active presence in Poland’s political life. Nonetheless, the archbishop was too important to be openly challenged by other hierarchs, and his sympathy toward Woodstock Station forced the priests to adopt a less confrontational stance toward the event, at least officially.
Conclusion: Media Abortions and Visibility in Community
Critical coverage of Woodstock Station in the Polish media, the conflict between Owsiak and The Prodigy, as well as the struggles between Woodstock Station and Jesus Station, all point at the complexity of this event, which escapes the conventional definition of a music festival. At the same time, one can argue that the Polish Catholic Church , together with conservative journalists, is the most aware of Woodstock Station’s influence on young people, hence its efforts to make Jesus Station more inviting for the festival audience. From this standpoint, the Catholic Church is a more careful observer of contemporary society in Poland than the mainstream media, which dismiss the festival as provincial and ignore the several hundred thousand people who find Woodstock Station an event where they are welcomed and respected. These media accuse Woodstock Station of not being “spectacular” enough: it is too peaceful, too familiar, and repetitive. A journalist from the daily “Gazeta Wyborcza ” told Owsiak that after the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity showed Poles, to their own amazement, that they were more caring about others than they had thought, the winter drives became “like the Holy Mass: boring and predictable” for the media (Owsiak 2011, p. 147). Despite the seemingly rebellious rock-festival imagery, the same argument applies to Woodstock Station.
Daniel Dayan (2005) argues that media play the role of “abortionists,” blocking certain types of information they deem unfit to be made public. In his opinion, media “monstrations,” or acts of showing, direct attention to those elements that the media find newsworthy. This leaves all the other features outside media interpretation—in other words, invisible. In the context of Woodstock Station, what the Polish media ignore is the paradox of creating and cultivating a massive, peaceful, respectful community, even if temporary, in a society overwhelmingly marked by mistrust and suspicion.Footnote 49 In addition, by focusing solely on the music aspect of the festival, they overlook, or “abort,” the fact that it has become a mass celebration for young, unprivileged people from the Polish province. These media fail to notice that people can engage in acts of kindness and respect toward each other even without the visibility given by media coverage, an element that has been instrumental to the success of the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity . Thus, one of the most surprising developments related to Woodstock Station’s phenomenon is the fact that public debates neglect the event in its (perhaps naive) idealism, which in turn only strengthens Woodstock Station’s unique status in the eyes of the participants as something impossible to penetrate by outsiders. “You have to go to Woodstock to understand it” was a claim made by virtually all of my interviewees, regardless of age, background, or financial means. Nonetheless, the festival is marginalized, instead of noticing that this mass event may be an indication of a larger positive change in the cultural practices of Polish society, and, in essence, a broadening of its own social imaginary. The persistence of the major Polish media in discounting a festival favored by people from the province represents a somewhat similar approach as that adopted toward the sanctuary in Licheń : both are dismissed as provincial, kitschy (Licheń) or outdated (Woodstock Station), and unattractive to well-educated, affluent urbanites. Still, while mainstream media commit “abortions” of the Polish province, it achieves its own visibility —and this, perhaps, is one of the biggest accomplishments of post-1989 Polish society.
The festival crowd the Church demonizes and fears, and the crowd that the media belittle and overlook, comprises people who overcome their mistrust, who take care of others, and who engage in conversation—rather than the rebellious confrontation they are suspected of—with the organizers of their social existence, such as the Catholic Church , the police, and other state institutions. In this, young people illustrate a considerable change in Polish society today, a shift from fighting against the state to maintaining dialogue with it. Their optimism may be the consequence of their young age, and the fact that they did not have to live under Communist rule. At the same time, Owsiak observes that the “legendary ambience” the festival audience praises is, paradoxically, the result of the absence of such amity in society’s everyday relations, often tainted with distrust. Nevertheless, in the young people’s spontaneous acts of sympathy toward strangers, they embody a fundamental change in thinking about community and a desire to actively participate in it in contemporary Poland.
Woodstock Station is neither an old protest movement, nor a contemporary commercial music event. It is a gathering of people who want to be together in a setting they co-create, and where they can be responsible for their own enjoyment. It is possible that the power of Woodstock Station lies in the fact that, unlike the American Woodstock in 1969, or Jarocin in the 1980s, it does not want to be a protest movement more than a festival. Instead, it is a celebration of everyday kindness that can be freely practiced in the post-1989 Polish democratic society. Yet the importance of Woodstock Station’s non-festival features, such as the Academy of Exceptionally Beautiful Arts or Jesus Station , points at its potential as a vehicle for meaningful public discussion about practicing shared values in contemporary Poland. In the act of being together, people at Woodstock Station are doing what—after decades of Communism —Poles find so difficult to imagine: that even without the solemnity and dedication to the common good—which, in Poland’s history, was often reserved for periods of struggle and resistance—after 1989 , people enjoy the freedom to be kind to others also when they have the liberty to do almost anything they want.
Notes
- 1.
Information based on data from The European Festival Association, Yourope, https://www.yourope.org/cms/festival/woodstock-festival/
- 2.
Woodstock Station attendees use internet forums to share information about traveling to the festival, prices of food and beverages at the site, and about the generally welcoming atmosphere of the festival, which is often the main reason why they continue coming back to Woodstock Station each year. Comments such as “I’ve been to Woodstock Station many times already because the people there are wonderful,” are common. See, for example, Uctok forum http://uctok.com/
- 3.
I conducted over forty short interviews with the festival attendees during Woodstock Station in 2012, and several more with regular attendees after the festival. Although, in comparison to the audience of around half a million, it is a number that does not allow for broad generalizations, I believe it provides clues to understanding people’s participation in the Woodstock Station festival.
- 4.
Only two television channels, both state-owned, were available in Poland at the beginning of the 1990s, before cable and regional television channels were introduced.
- 5.
During the first drive in 1993, the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity collected almost 2.5 million zlotys (over 1.5 million dollars); in 2018, it was almost 126.4 million zlotys (nearly 34.5 million dollars). See http://www.wosp.org.pl/final/o_finale/finaly_w_liczbach
- 6.
Allegro.pl is one of the most visited sites on the Polish internet, and two-thirds of all online auctions in Poland take place there. In 2001, the website collected over 113,000 zlotys (around 27,000 dollars) for the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity; in 2018 the sum was well over 9 million zlotys (2.6 million dollars). See https://aukcje.wosp.org.pl/
- 7.
In 2010, the golden heart pin with the number one on it was auctioned off for a record sum of over 1.1 million zlotys (almost 370,000 dollars). In other years the prices for the first three golden hearts averaged between 100,000 and 300,000 zlotys (33,000 to 100,000 dollars). See https://www.wosp.org.pl/final/wesprzyj/zlote-serduszka
- 8.
Bank transfers are immediately tracked, and volunteers who collect money on the streets bring the tin cans back to the local centers, where the raised sums are counted and reported to the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity headquarters.
- 9.
Collecting money, instead of credit card information, is a popular way of raising funds for charity in Poland. For example, each year during All Saints Day, money is raised this way to renovate old cemeteries. It is also customary for people to give money to the Church by putting it on trays that are circulated among the faithful during the Sunday Mass. Furthermore, credit cards are still not very popular among Poles, particularly older people who are unaccustomed to using them.
- 10.
According to Leś, goods sent to Poland by foreign charities from 1984 to 1986 were worth over 100 million dollars. See Leś (2001, p. 109).
- 11.
Although the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity is the most visible charity event in the media, other non-religious charity organizations that emerged in post-1989 Poland have also been raising millions of zlotys. These include the Polish Humanitarian Action, a non-governmental organization focused on providing aid abroad, and the Foundation for Children “Help on Time,” which supports children who require complicated medical treatment. See, for example, Olwert (2010).
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
Unless otherwise noted, Owsiak’s statements come from an hour-long interview I conducted with him in January 2013.
- 15.
In his article, Kapoor (2012) lists a chart (p. 22) with the post-Live 8 “album boost” in sales at HMV and Amazon stores of musicians who took part in the charity concert.
- 16.
In comparison, the festival in Jarocin organized a year earlier gathered an audience only half that size.
- 17.
For example, despite close financial monitoring of non-governmental organizations in Poland, in 2012 the founder of a well-known Polish non-profit, KidProtect.pl, admitted to having stolen well over 430,000 zlotys (over 140,000 dollars) from the organization. More recently, Mateusz Kijowski, the leader of the largest anti-government organization, The Committee for the Defense of Democracy (Komitet Obrony Demokracji; see the following chapter), which has been organizing pro-democratic demonstrations all over Poland since the Law and Justice government began undermining the rule of law, was accused of stealing the organization’s funds, which are based on voluntary donations. See Deja (2017).
- 18.
While there is no specific data on charity engagement in Poland, it is smaller than the European average (see Charities Aid Foundation’s World Giving Index 2017). Thus, one can also argue the opposite: the Grand Orchestra of Christmas Charity encourages this type of activity among people who would otherwise not participate in charities.
- 19.
In 1981, the musician Ozzy Osbourne, a member of the heavy metal band Black Sabbath, bit the head off a dove, while intoxicated, at a meeting with the representatives of his record label. In the following year, he bit the head off a bat during a live concert, thinking it was made of rubber. Critics of rock and metal music often referred to these acts of brutality as proof of the genres’ intrinsic moral corruption. See Sullivan (2004), Munson (2007).
- 20.
- 21.
A study from 2017 showed that Poles consider Owsiak the person with the most authority (30%). Behind him were president Andrzej Duda (12%) and the Solidarity hero, Lech Wałęsa (7%). See https://wiadomosci.wp.pl/sondaz-jerzy-owsiak-i-andrzej-duda-najwiekszymi-autorytetami-dla-polakow-6086495330681473a
- 22.
The topic of social distrust in Poland is discussed, for example, in Czapiński and Panek (2015).
- 23.
A round-trip bus ticket costs around 120 zlotys (35 dollars), while a second-class train ticket costs up to 90 zlotys (25 dollars), depending on the length of the trip.
- 24.
Leaving Kostrzyn by car after the festival is difficult, and it is not unusual for cars to be stuck in traffic jams on the small local roads for over four hours before being able to get to the highway.
- 25.
From a historical and geopolitical perspective, it is interesting that, together with the Polish audience, people from these countries form a music festival version of the Visegrád Group.
- 26.
For example, rock music concerts were an important element of the 2004–2005 Orange Revolution, which led to the annulment of falsified presidential elections and, as a result, brought the pro-Western presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko to power.
- 27.
- 28.
In my hour-long interview with a musician who rejected the offer to play at Woodstock Station, the artist argued that the reason was financial: the massive festival audience does not justify the expenses of the trip, additional staff, and not being able to rest in the privacy of one’s own room.
- 29.
This comment was also made by the locals I talked to in the town of Kostrzyn, who did not attend the festival but who saw the thousands of festivalgoers in the town center. They came there to buy food and alcohol at the local stores, and to eat home-style meals in the few bars. Still, it is worth noting that the enthusiasm of Kostrzyn residents was also financial. As the employees of the bars and stores openly stated, these establishments make most of their annual income during the festival.
- 30.
Nosowska’s band, Hey, gained instant fame after performing at the festival in Jarocin in 1992.
- 31.
For example, unlike other festivals, Woodstock Station does not hold bag checks, and people can bring food and alcohol with them. This is a policy seldom found at other such events, which make money on tickets, liquor, and food sales. Data on safety based on police official press releases; see, for example, http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/7,114,883,22,198,672,przystanek-woodstock-policja-podsumowuje-ponad-150-przestepstw.html
- 32.
I had short conversations with ten members of the Peace Patrol at the festival. In addition, I conducted a separate hour-long interview with a former member of the Peace Patrol. See also: https://www.wosp.org.pl/uczymy-ratowac
- 33.
The aspect of community was particularly emphasized by one of my interviewees who merges these two worlds: he lives in a big city, attends expensive festivals, and is at the same time a huge fan of Woodstock Station because of the atmosphere of “being together with others” he finds there.
- 34.
It is worth noting that a slightly more nuanced newspaper article about the festival was published by the popular Polish non-fiction writer, Ziemowit Szczerek (2017).
- 35.
Tocqueville describes “habits of the heart” as customs, or “ideas which shape mental habits,” that make individuals part of a larger community. See Tocqueville (2003, p. 336).
- 36.
Open’er, often mocked by Woodstock Station attendees, is another big Polish music festival that invites non-governmental organizations.
- 37.
The name is a play of words on the academy of fine arts.
- 38.
The Never Again Foundation’s so-called Olympics organized at Woodstock Station are inspired by “Rock Against Racism,” a British campaign created in the 1970s, which used rock concerts to combat racism, particularly within soccer stadiums. The Olympics hosted by the anti-racist non-governmental Never Again Foundation refer to that idea by placing its own event in a music festival context, and treating it is a vehicle for promoting peace and mutual respect. See Pankowski (2003).
- 39.
According to recent data, 86.4% Poles drink alcohol, compared to 84.6%, which was EU average. See RARHA SEAS (2016).
- 40.
In 2016 the police were trusted by 72% of Poles; see CBOS (2016).
- 41.
The fines usually range from 50 to 500 zlotys (15–145 dollars).
- 42.
For example, in 2017, around 500 people came specifically to Jesus Station, compared to 250,000 at Woodstock Station that same year. See PAP (2017).
- 43.
- 44.
Nevertheless, critics of this open approach can be found among priests as well as conservative sympathizers with the Church. They would rather see the institution as solid, not giving in to the contemporary ills Woodstock Station exemplifies for them. For these critics, even the slightest welcoming gestures of Jesus Station toward Woodstock Station pose a threat to the unquestionable authority of the religious institution. See, for example, Raczkowski (2012), TOK FM (2012), Morciniec (2013), and Terlikowski (2013).
- 45.
- 46.
People working at Jesus Station were not only priests and nuns, but also lay volunteers, usually from nearby parishes.
- 47.
Despite the often-heard accusations made by critics of Woodstock Station that the festival promotes Satanism, I did not find anyone who claimed to believe in Satan there. Instead, most of the people I talked to at Woodstock Station said they believed in God, and often declared themselves as Catholics.
- 48.
For example, Janina Paradowska, one of the most respected Polish political commentators who was invited for a talk at the Academy of Exceptionally Beautiful Arts, described her positive surprise in her weekly column. See Paradowska (2012).
- 49.
According to biannual polls conducted since 2000, more than 70% of Poles have been consistently claiming that “one has to be very careful when maintaining relations with others.” See Czapiński and Panek (2015).
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Chmielewska-Szlajfer, H. (2019). Woodstock Station Festival: Practicing Recognition. In: Reshaping Poland’s Community after Communism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78735-0_3
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