Jenna Ansell (Medicine Festival): Beyond Festival Utopia

Life is a Festival #181

After seven years and more than 180 episodes, this is the final episode of Life Is a Festival in its current form.
It felt right to close this chapter with a conversation with my friend Jenna Ansell, cofounder of Medicine Festival about what festivals have promised, what they’ve delivered, and what still matters.

In this conversation, we explore why the utopian promise of festival culture feels strained in 2025, whether large gatherings can still act as engines of cultural change, and the difference between individual transformation and collective healing. We talk about ancient ritual technologies, the role of land and lineage, the limits of peak experience, and why play, myth, and the trickster still matter in dark times.

Jenna Ansell is the co-founder and managing director of Medicine Festival in the United Kingdom. With a background in social anthropology from Cambridge and international relations from Johns Hopkins, she has worked across political, cultural, and conscious events for over twenty years. Through Medicine Festival, Jenna has helped create a large-scale ceremonial gathering centered on indigenous wisdom, community healing, and relationship to land, and is emerging as a key bridge-builder between festival culture, academia, and spiritual traditions.

Timestamps:

(08:45) – The missing tipping point: why festival utopia never arrived
(10:15) – Festivals as liminal spaces and temporary autonomous zones
(14:00) – Status-quo festivals vs revolutionary festivals
(17:00) – Land, ritual, and why Burning Man falls short
(21:00) – What makes Medicine Festival fundamentally different
(27:30) – Peak experiences, healing culture, and getting stuck in the underworld
(29:45) – Collective healing, ancient traditions, and remembering community
(38:00) – Rites of passage, myth, and why festivals still matter
(44:00) – Advice to young festival builders in 2025
(47:00) – Utopia, striving together, and redefining success

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