Folk and Folklife

[jaunthie]

I had to miss Folklife last year, for the first time in many years. This year, however, I made it to the festival. It wasn't an ideal day - cold, rather blustery - but that's never mattered much before, and I had excellent company in fisherbear, monkeybard, and Ryalin. I had a very good time, but a few things disturbed me. The fact that the suggested donation had gone up as much as it had surprised me a bit; but hey, at least it's still a suggested donation, and it keeps the Festival going year after year without having to charge admission (which would ruin it). What was much worse was the change in participation. In previous years, the grounds have been packed with performers of all kinds: buskers, street musicians, jugglers, weird performance artists, off-the-cuff henna vendors, bubble blowers, you name it - and a gigantic drum circle, usually thronged about with dancers. These folks existed cheek-by-jowl with all the food vendors, official performance stages, merchants, tourists, family groups, college kids, Scandanavian/Croatian/Japanese/Scottish/Egyptian/Greek/African dancers/singers/storytellers/instrumentalists/shanty-chanters/artists, and so on. Folklife has always been a hodgepodge (check out their artist schedule for this year if you don't believe me).

Apparently all that changed last year. The festival organizers kicked out the drum circle idea and actively police to keep one from forming. There are signs everywhere telling street performers and buskers to "report to the festival coordinators office to see about getting a venue", while exhorting 'the rest of us' to participate, watch, have fun, and so on.

This bugs the crap out of me. The festival I remember has always been about folk - and not just the dance troupes, choirs, and musical ensembles that every year fill all the stages (over 20) all hours of the festival. It's also been about the folk, from the families with kids and dogs in tow, to the punks who pitch picnic blankets on the grass and hang out all day smoking cigarettes and watching the scene, to the compulsive hackey-sack/juggling/poi-ball/frisbee players, to the fountain-runners, and yes, to the sweaty drummers toting in every kind of hand-drum imaginable and filling the entire center with a never-ending pulsebeat of sound, surrounded by swaying masses of patchouli-drenched dancers. Without them, the festival to me seems to have lost a bit of its soul. And despite the fact that I had a really good time today, I think it would have been even better if they'd been free to be there, too.

Of course, I did see several punked-out kids in the crowd giddily attempting to Irish step-dance to the vaguely zydeco-ish music on one of the stages. You don't get much more Folklife than that.

Comments

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Gah! I'm note entirely surprised, but it makes me feel better about having spent most of the weekend at a martial arts retreat, and that I'm going to be too busy today to go.

[jaunthie.livejournal.com]

Well, they have set up a percussion tent, which theoretically is there for anyone to 'learn to drum', with sponsored sessions on various kinds of percussion and sample instruments for people to try. By the time we left yesterday, it seemed as if it had been taken over by the people who would have been in the drum-circle anyway. No dancers, but the drumming was just about as vibrant (and persistent) as in previous years. Folk will find a way.