A Winnipeg Wrapup

By Kristopher Kerzman
Contributing Writer

The short story is this: I met Jeff Woodrow at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. But the long story, like most connections made between people at the Folk Festival, is a much richer tale.

I met Jeff Woodrow while taking a leak at two in the morning along the fence line in the festival campground. We shared greetings and struck up a conversation. It turned out Jeff had just woken up, having taken a nap after finishing a two-and-a-half day drive from a town north of Toronto. Me, well, I was just hanging out drinking one of the only PBRs within 150 miles.

Woodrow came all this way to sell t-shirts with hand-drawn pictures of strangers on them and, when you buy one, you can get your own photo on one to be sold somewhere down the road. Me? I basically came to drink PBR and talk to people like him.

The Folk Festival has a way of making these types of exchanges relatively commonplace. Whether it’s through the exquisite efforts of festival campers committed to building an ad-hoc community/freak show for five days, or the tireless efforts of 2,600 festival volunteers and staff committed to staging a world-class event, or through the audience that commits to carving a week out of their summer to take in the festival, the common thread is commitment.

The commitment breeds a sense of engaged involvement, and the result is an inclusive and immersive experience that, frankly, makes you feel like part of one big, happy family.

Consider the work done by some of the more hardcore festival campers. Every year, a group called the Castle Boys construct elaborate structures within the campground itself, throwing massive parties and hosting boisterous live music in the wee hours of the morning. This year, they made a ten-foot tall sphinx, complete with stage, and what can only be described as a “percussion pyramid.”

Ashley Elliot, a bystander watching her toddler beat on the percussion pyramid, remarked at how the entire experience at once brings people together and allows them to be themselves. “People get to fly their freak flag,” she said, “there’s so much individualism here.”

Robert Williams and Kristie Latta, both from Winnipeg, joined the Castle Boys this year with mobile puppets, a large, cartoonish yellow pedal taxi, and a couple of bicycle chariots. Without a whiff of regret, Latta casually mentioned that they began work on this project four months earlier. Williams added that while these projects need the Folk Festival stamp of approval, they are purely the efforts of campers not at all affiliated with the festival. As we spoke, Robert was putting the finishing touches on a dragon to be used in a parade later in the day.

At the festival itself, six daytime stages, a family area, and a large selection of food vendors do as much to satisfy individuals as to bring them together for the nightly main stage shows. This fact is not lost on veterans Gary Abrams and Mark Sinkin who, between them, have 43 years of Folk Festival experience.

“You can sit down at one stage and listen to someone from Manitoba, then someone from Minnesota, and then someone from Africa the next time,” said Abrams.

“Or even together in the same workshop,” Sinkin added. “It’s like traveling the world without having to go anywhere.”

That was my takeaway from this year’s Folk Festival: from many, one. People from a fairly wide swath of ages, income levels, geographic origins, and ethnicity all come together not to simply pay for a ticket and be entertained, but to include themselves in something.

Despite grumblings about the growing pains of this increasingly popular festival (now in its 37th year), its faithful continue to turn out in droves to volunteer for real labor, construct eye-popping campsites, pick up their own garbage, and (in my case) give your 11-month-old a bite of banana while mom is shopping for merch. They don’t keep coming back year after year because THE band is there or because marketing forces compel them. They turn up because
they feel like they belong there. Pure and simple.

Jerry Bourbonnais of St. Paul, a 15-year Folkfester proudly sporting a Summit Brewing t-shirt, summed it up nicely. We met, poetically enough, while waiting in line at a port-o-potty. We chatted about the lack of an experience like the Folk Festival in our own area. While we identified the usual obstacles - lack of funds for such a broad range of people, for instance - we also struck on the fact that, after almost two generations of trial and error, the Folk Festival has survived to the point where it is an institution of sorts, a trust held by what Bourbonnais called “friendly and easy-going Canadian people” and those that take their time, money and effort and invest it into something for which the returns are thoroughly intangible and worth all the more because of that. And then, he hit it right on the nose.

“I feel great whenever I come here,” he said, “it’s just like one, big happy family.”

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